Capture Apple Pay payments automatically with a Shortcut

Honestly, the maths was never the hard part of splitting expenses. It’s remembering to type the thing in at all. You pay for the supermarket run, you mean to add it later, and by the evening you’ve forgotten the amount and roughly who was there.

So Splitsies can now catch Apple Pay payments for you. You wire up one Shortcuts automation, and from then on every Apple Pay purchase lands in a private inbox on your phone. You glance at it later, convert the shared ones into a group expense, and ignore the rest. Nothing leaves your device until you convert something, so your personal spending stays personal.

It takes about five minutes to set up. You only do it once.

Before you start

• An iPhone on iOS 17 or later. That’s the version where Apple added the Transaction trigger this relies on.
• The Splitsies app installed.
• Apple Pay set up with at least one card in Wallet. The automation fires when a Wallet payment goes through, so a card in there is the thing that makes it tick.
• Optional: notifications turned on for Splitsies, if you want a little nudge each time something’s captured. There’s a button for that under Profile, in the Payment Capture section.

Setting it up

1. Open the Shortcuts app (it comes with iOS) and tap the Automation tab at the bottom, then the + in the top corner for a new automation.

2. Pick the Transaction trigger. It’s under the Wallet and Apple Pay heading. You can narrow it to specific cards, or leave it on any transaction. Turn on Run Immediately, and turn off Notify When Run. Splitsies sends its own notification, so there’s no need for two banners every time you buy a coffee.

3. Add the action. Tap to add a new (blank) action, search for Splitsies, and choose Log Captured Payment.

4. Map the fields. This is the bit that tripped me up the first time, because there’s no separate “mapping” screen, it all happens inside the action you just added. Tap each field, choose Shortcut Input, and pick the matching property from the transaction:

   • Amount ← Currency Amount
   • Merchant ← Name
   • Currency ← Currency Code

   That’s all you map. The capture is timestamped automatically, since the automation runs the moment you pay.

5. Save. Tap the checkmark or Done in the top corner, and that’s the automation finished.

One naming quirk worth knowing: in the Shortcuts editor the action is called Log Captured Payment. “Log payment in Splitsies” is only the phrase you’d say to Siri, so don’t go hunting for that one in the action list.

Your first capture

The quickest way to check it works is to buy something small with Apple Pay, the way you normally would.

• Pay with Apple Pay at a shop, or send yourself a small purchase.
• Wait a second or two for the Wallet payment confirmation.
• The automation fires in the background. Splitsies doesn’t need to be open.
• If you turned notifications on, a “Payment captured” nudge appears. Tap it and it opens straight to the inbox.

The capture sits in the inbox with an unread badge until you deal with it. Splitsies also takes a guess at the category from the merchant name, so a payment to your local Rewe or Edeka turns up already marked as groceries more often than not.

If it’s not working

• The action isn’t in the list. Make sure Splitsies is actually installed, then fully quit and reopen Shortcuts so it picks up the app’s actions.
• Nothing shows up after a payment. Check the automation is set to Run Immediately and not “ask first”. You can also look in iPhone Settings, then Shortcuts, and make sure it’s allowed to run.
• You paid but nothing happened. Was it Apple Pay? A physical card swipe or chip won’t trigger anything.
• No notification. Turn notifications on under Profile, Payment Capture, Enable Notifications. If you said no to notifications at some point, iOS won’t ask twice, so that button takes you straight to the Settings page where you can flip them back on. The capture still lands in the inbox either way, you just won’t get the nudge.
• The amount looks wrong or comes through as zero. Open the action and check you inserted the Currency Amount variable rather than typing a number by hand.
• “Conversion Error” when the automation runs. This means a field got the whole transaction instead of one of its properties. Tap into each field and pick the specific property (Currency Amount, Name, Currency Code) from Shortcut Input, not Shortcut Input on its own.

If it’s still misbehaving, deleting the automation and rebuilding it from step one clears up most of the odd cases.

Anyway, that’s the whole thing. It started as a way to stop me forgetting the supermarket run, and it’s quietly become the way I add most of my shared expenses. If the setup fights you somewhere I haven’t covered, write to support@splitsies.dev. I read every email.