Payment capture

Set up automatic Apple Pay capture

Wire up one Shortcuts automation and every Apple Pay payment quietly lands in an inbox on your phone, ready to turn into a shared expense. Until you actually convert one, none of it touches the server. Here's the whole thing, with a screenshot of every step.

The steps

It's a one-time setup and takes about five minutes.

1. 1. Start a new automation

   Shortcuts ships with iOS, so it's already on your phone. Open it, tap the Automation tab at the bottom, then New Automation (or the + in the top corner).

   

2. 2. Pick the Wallet trigger

   Scroll the list of triggers and choose Wallet, the "When I tap a Wallet Card or Pass" one. That's the trigger that fires on an Apple Pay payment.

   

3. 3. Choose your cards

   Leave it on all your cards, or narrow it to specific ones and categories. Don't tap Next yet, scroll down first, there's one more setting on this screen.

   

4. 4. Run it immediately

   Further down the same screen, turn on Run Immediately and turn off Notify When Run (Splitsies sends its own notification, so you don't want two banners every time you buy a coffee). Now tap Next.

   

5. 5. Create New Shortcut

   Now you build what the automation does. Under Get Started, tap "Create New Shortcut".

   

6. 6. Find the Splitsies action

   Search for Splitsies and choose Log Captured Payment. (That name only shows up in the editor. "Log payment in Splitsies" is the Siri phrase, so don't go hunting for it in the action list.)

   

7. 7. Tap the first field

   The action has three fields: Amount, Merchant, and Currency. There's no separate mapping screen, you fill them in right here. Tap a field to start.

   

8. 8. Choose Shortcut Input

   Pick Shortcut Input, which is the transaction the automation just caught. You'll do this for each of the three fields, then pick which property of the transaction goes where.

   

9. 9. Each field now says Shortcut Input

   After you pick it, the field just reads "Shortcut Input", which is the whole transaction rather than the one value Splitsies needs. So you tap that and choose the exact property. You'll do this for all three fields, starting with Amount.

   

10. 10. Map Amount ← Currency Amount

    Tap Type and pick Currency Amount from the list. That's the cleaned-up number Splitsies wants for the amount.

    

11. 11. Map Merchant ← Merchant

    Do Merchant next. Tap its Shortcut Input, then pick Merchant from the list. This one looks a bit different: the Type stays Transaction, because Merchant is a property of the transaction rather than a separate format like Currency Amount.

    

12. 12. Map Currency ← Currency Code

    Last field: tap Currency's Shortcut Input and pick Currency Code. The capture is timestamped automatically, since the automation runs the moment you pay.

    

13. 13. Review and tap Done

    Check it reads Run Immediately, with the Wallet trigger under When and Log Captured Payment under Do, then tap Done.

    

14. 14. That's it

    Your new automation shows up in the list. You only build it once.

    

What happens next

Buy something small with Apple Pay the way you normally would. The automation fires in the background a second or two later, and Splitsies doesn't even need to be open. If you turned notifications on, a "Payment captured" nudge appears, right alongside your bank's own notification, and tapping it opens straight to the inbox.

The capture sits in the inbox with an unread badge until you deal with it. Convert the shared ones and they open the normal Add Expense form, already filled in with the amount, merchant, currency, and a guessed category, so you just pick the group and save. Dismiss the rest and they're deleted locally. The server only ever hears about the expenses you explicitly convert.

If it's not working

• The action isn't in the list. Make sure Splitsies is 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". In iPhone Settings → Shortcuts, 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.
• The amount looks wrong or comes through as zero. Open the action and check you inserted the Currency Amount property rather than typing a number by hand.
• "Conversion Error" when it runs. A field got the whole transaction instead of one of its properties. Tap into each field and pick the specific property 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.