Shopping Spree — Simplify your budget tracking
Introducing Shopping Spree—a new way to stay on top of your budget while shopping!
Today, I’m excited to announce a new way to simplify your budget tracking with Bills to Budget - Shopping Spree!
Shopping Spree is perfect for those times when you’re out shopping, and planning to visit a few stores. You need to know exactly what is left in your Spending Budget, and you need to be able to track a purchase as quickly as possible. Just start a Shopping Spree on your ‘Shopping’ or ‘Holiday Spending’ budgets, and Bills to Budget will start a Live Activity to show you exactly what you have left to spend right on your Lock Screen, and in the Dynamic Island - no more guessing or mental math!
Shopping Spree also features a one-touch button to bring you directly into the app to create a new expense in mere seconds, ensuring nothing is forgotten.
Shopping Spree is the latest innovation from Bills to Budget, designed to make expense tracking simpler, faster, and more accurate.
Ready to give it a try? Next time you’re heading out for a shopping trip, start a Shopping Spree and see how easy it is to stay on budget!
Available Monday, September 16th
Introducing Account Insights!
Account Insights goes beyond showing you balances—it helps you understand what your financial data means. By highlighting trends like sharp spending increases or changes in savings, it brings clarity to your financial habits, making it easier to stay on track with your goals.
Understand Your Spending and Saving Like Never Before
We’re excited to unveil Account Insights, a new feature designed to help you see where your money is going, identify trends, and make more informed decisions about your finances. Whether you’re trying to save for something special or just want to keep a closer eye on daily expenses, Account Insights gives you a clearer understanding of your financial habits, so you can plan your future with confidence.
Make Sense of Your Financial Habits
Seeing your current balances is one thing — understanding them is quite another. With Account Insights, you can view trends in your spending and savings, helping you stay on track with your financial goals. Maybe you’ve been meaning to save more, or maybe you’ve noticed your expenses creeping up over the last few weeks. These Insights can shine a light on the areas you need to adjust, helping you make smarter financial decisions.
Account Insights provides intuitive charts and views that make it easy to track where your money is going and where it could be better spent. Whether it’s spotting patterns of unnecessary spending or discovering opportunities to boost your savings, these insights are designed to give you the knowledge and confidence to take control of your financial life.
How to Get Started
Setting up Account Insights is simple. To link your Apple Card, Apple Cash, or Savings account, just follow these steps:
Open Bills to Budget and navigate to your existing Accounts.
Select the "Link to an Apple Account" option from the Create/Edit Account screen.
Walk through Apple's quick linking process.
Once connected, you’ll be able to access your balance histories securely, right in the app. And if you don’t have an Apple account or aren’t ready to link just yet, you can still explore the feature through our Financial Explorer mode, which gives you a feel for the Insights without connecting any accounts.
Because Privacy Matters
Your privacy matters. No personal data ever touches our servers. Your financial information is securely pulled from your Apple Wallet on-device through the FinanceKit API, meaning you get to stay in full control of your data at all times.
Streamline your Budget Tracking with iOS 17 Transaction Automations
iOS 17 and Bills to Budget bring Automations to budget tracking!
Recording your expenses isn’t always easy - grabbing a bite at the drive through or the coffee shop, you can easily forget to record it, and just go about your day. iOS 17 and the Shortcuts app comes with a hidden gem, however, that can really help - “Transaction Automations”, which can run a task every time you Tap to Pay with Apple Pay. And Bills to Budget makes it simple to use!
With the Bills to Budget Plus or Family Plus plans, you can create Spending Budgets to plan for your day to day spending, and the built-in Shortcuts commands make it easy to record a Budget Payment from Siri or from a more complex Shortcut - let’s walk through how we can take advantage of this with the new Automations.
Assuming you have a Spending Budget already created, open the Shortcuts App (built in to iOS), and tap on the Automations tab. Scrolling down, you’ll find a new ‘Transaction’ automation - this is our starting point.
Tapping this will bring you to a screen that shows all of your Apple Pay cards a set of Categories, and a link to show Merchants (I’ve obscured most of my own cards here, but this should be familiar if you’ve used Apple Pay). As you can tell, this is highly customizable - I recommend starting by keeping things simple, and leaving everything highlighted, but you can experiment with what works best for you. For example, you could have different Cards or different Categories/Merchants (the stores you have shopped in) create Budget Payments against different Spending Budgets.
Before moving on, you’ll want to select ‘Run Immediately’, to ensure the action happens automatically, and I recommend selecting ‘Notify When Run’, which will show you a summary of a transaction when it happens (assuming you haven’t already put your phone in your pocket, of course).
Great - now we have the Automation ‘Trigger’ created, let’s configure the Action. The next screen will show some suggested actions to take - tap ‘New Blank Automation’, followed by ‘Add Action’, and then select the ‘Apps’ tab. Find Bills to Budget in the list of apps (it will be just ‘Bills’ here), and then select ‘Make a Budget Payment’ from the list of Shortcut tasks that the app makes available.
Now it’s time to configure the Action itself - tap the right facing arrow to show more options, and then enable “From Wallet Automation”, to customize this action directly for our Automation. Select the Spending Budget you want to make the payment against, and then tap the “‘Amount’ from Automation” field - the next part is a bit unintuitive for the Shortcuts App, but if you scroll the slider just above the keyboard to the left, you will eventually find a ‘Shortcut Input’ option. Select this option, and then select it again to choose the field from the Input that you want use here - in this case, we want to select the ‘Amount’ field (see images for detail).
Finally, go through the same process to select the ‘Name’ value for the “‘Name’ from Automation” field, and then tap Done. And you’re all set! The next time you use Tap to Pay for a transaction, a payment will automatically be registered against your budget!
This is only a small piece of what the Shortcuts app can do, and Bills to Budget includes several actions that you can include in your automations, manually triggered Shortcuts, or can even be triggered with your voice using Siri.
Happy Budgeting!