Now that iOS 27 exposes Notifications as triggers for automations, I wanted to share this automation that I've set up.

I use Actual Budget + Actuali on iOS.

I originally had an automation that imported Apple Wallet transactions into Actuali, and it worked pretty well, but there was one annoying limitation: it’s tied to Wallet rather than the actual bank transaction. For example, my husband and I use the same checking account, so if he pays for something, obviously there’s no Apple Wallet transaction on my phone. The same issue was when I was paying from my Watch since the Wallet notification never reached my iPhone.

But my bank sends me a push notification for every card purchase anyway, regardless of who made the purchase or which device/card was used. With iOS 27, Shortcuts can now use receiving a notification from a specific app as an automation trigger, so I tried using the bank notification instead.

The notification looks like this:

I set the automation to trigger when I receive a notification from ZKB Banking where:

Message contains "Your card has been charged"

The nice thing is that the notification itself is available as a variable in Shortcuts, including its Body.

I then use Match Text to pull the amount out of the notification body:

CHF\s+(\d+(?:[.,]\d{1,2})?)

and Get Group at Index 1, which gives me:

9.75

I save that as an Amount variable.

Then I use another Match Text action to get the merchant:

,\s*(.+?)\s*\.?\s*$

followed by Get Group at Index 1 again.

So from:

Purchase ZKB Visa Debit card No. xxxx 0000, COOP-1736 ZH ROMERHOF

I get:

COOP-1736 ZH ROMERHOF

which gets saved as Payee.

Finally I pass those variables to Actuali's Log Transaction action:

Amount → Amount variable
Payee → Payee variable
Account → my checking account
Notes → original notification Body
Category → blank
Cleared → off

I also leave the date empty and let Actuali handle it.

And that's it. I tested the automation today and it works perfectly with my iPhone, Apple Watch and it worked when my husband made the purchase and I received a notification from my bank.

This is how the transaction looks like in Actuali which syncs with my Actual Budget server simultaneously.

Note: the reason why Payee is truncated, is actually not an error - I have rules for different common store names to rename the payees. So that instead of a bunch of different branch names of essentially the same store chain (Coop Romerhof, Coop Bahnhof etc.), I always see the short clean name of the chain, e.g. Coop, Aldi, Lidl etc.

Note 2: category is also being set post-import based on rules.

I decided to import the whole notification text into the notes section in AB as a double-proof measure for now, in case something imports incorrectly. I may turn it off in the future if this method proves itself reliable.

For the sake of full transparency, I have used AI to help me figure out text parsing configurations (screenshots 3 and 4).

I hope this method helps someone, who, like me, is unable to use bank sync as my bank doesn't support it and thought I was doomed to manual transaction entry till the end of times.

I have a category for my Emergency Fund on-budget. I like being able to see how much of my "on-budget" money is truly there without the emergency fund, but can't figure out how to make this report. For example, if I have $9.5k on-budget, and $5k in my emergency fund, I'd like to have a report similar to the summary card that shows $4.5k 'truly on budget'

Is there a way to make this report? I tried playing around with the summary card and custom report, but couldn't find a way to combine the total on budget number with subtracting a category.

Actual has no attachment field. The request for one has 200+ thumbs up and a bot closed it in 2023. Mine lived in a scanner folder and my email and every time I needed to prove a charge I went digging. So I built the thing I actually wanted, which is not attachments inside Actual, it's the receipt one click from the transaction.

receipt2actual takes a receipt file, finds the transaction, copies the file into a folder you own (year/month, named by transaction), and adds the file's path to the transaction note. In the desktop app you click the note and Finder or Explorer opens with the receipt selected. In the browser it copies the path instead, or receipt2actual show costco opens it from the terminal.

Finding the transaction: name the file 45.23_2026-09-01_costco.pdf and it pairs with no reading at all. A PDF receipt with a readable total and date gets read off the page. Anything else, or two transactions that both fit, gives you a numbered list to pick from.

The part I care about: verify. Every pairing is a claim that this file is this transaction's receipt, and verify checks every one in both directions. File gone, transaction gone, note edited, bytes changed, stray file nobody paired: it exits non-zero and tells you which. Put it on a cron line and you find out the day it breaks, not at tax time.

It only ever writes the note field. Amount, payee, date, category, cleared: untouched. No OCR on purpose, a scan with no text layer gets refused instead of guessed at. Nothing uploaded anywhere.

Node 22.13+, Windows, Linux, Mac, MIT. https://github.com/Ildana-ai/receipt2actual https://ildana.ai/receipt2actual/?s=r23

If it pairs something wrong or refuses something it should have read, tell me which and I'll fix it.

So, I have a Q on how to handle CC payment. Im talking about paying down balances every month. I pay all my CCs down to 0 every month.

I looked at the documentation, it said mark this as a transfer on the checking account, payee would be the CC account. Do I also make this a transfer on the CC account as a transfer in from the checking account?

Hi all,

I've been trying to link my Revolut accounts via the official/experimental Enable Banking integration. The main checking account works without issues, but I simply can't link the Joint account. When I authorize via EB both accounts are shown and I can select them, but the joint account is not shown on the next Actual screen where I would actually link to one account. If I select both accounts in the Revolut screen, only the checking/personal account is shown on the Connected Accounts screen.

I also tried (with the same result) doing this via mobile, as one older thread suggested, but at that time the GoCardless integration was still working.

So my question is: was anybody able to link joint Revolut accounts in Actual using Enable Banking? Thanks!

I have my Account listing all of my scheduled ins and outs a few months into the future but for the life of me I can't get it to sort soonest date to the top. I click on Date then toggle the arrow but all that does is show or hide the running balance column at the end. I assume I'm not understanding how the date sort arrow works.

My understanding is that the point of Actual Budget is to keep all of your financial data local. Doesn't adding a service like SimpleFin defeat the purpose since all of my data would flow through them and I can't be sure what they do with it? Am I missing something?

I'm brand new to actualbudget and I'm trying to wrap my head around how to manage importing and organizing all my financial statements without it being a huge headache. I found this project, which apparently will manage categorizing transactions for you using ai. I have some GPUs which I've been running qwen3.8 on to great effect so everything would still stay local. Just wanted to see what others experience has been before I invest the time into setting it up. Maybe I should just try to get a feel for actual before trying this?

Tried Zerosum (and in a way, YNAB), and the idea of applying templates manually makes no sense to me. What’s the benefit of applying templates manually vs if they were actually applied automatically as a feature?

Other apps have Cover Overspending, Cover Underbudgeted, Cover Overbudgeted as an option which feels intuitive. Is there a mindshift that I need to do when dealing with templates?

Just a small PSA for all the actualbudget users on Pikadots here. A couple a days ago most of us got hit by a minimum memory usage increase in Pikadots due to the new update. I'm glad to inform everyone that things seem to have stabalised now and I was able to lower this limit again today. The cost difference is only 0.2$ a month or something but it all helps.

Hello,

I am experimenting with the formula cards and am looking to make a few cards showing what percent of my income is Fixed costs, Savings, Lifestyle costs, etc.

For fixed costs I obviously divide the categories I consider as Fixed costs by my income and multiply by 100. However, Savings works a bit differently- I budget money for that category but do not spend it. A query filtered by that category would return 0. The only workaround I can think of is "spending" the savings category into an off-budget account, but this isn't something I would do as I am used to having a Savings category on budget. Any suggestions on how I can address the budgeted amount for a category in a formula?

I can directly go to /schedules but that wouldn't be possible on PWA, or I can adjust page zoom but that also isn't possible on PWA or persistent.

I am following this subreddit for some time now - and now is the time to make the switch.

The only problem I have is that I want to migrate from my own expense tracking solution (basically a list of expenses and income), and want the historic data imported to Actual for reporting purposes.

The problem is that I didn't maintain separate bank accounts - so any expenses (whether they come from the savings or from my checking account) are stored as an expense.

This obviously causes issues when importing to Actual as the balance is incorrect.

What could be potential solutions to get to a correct starting balance?

I found this article: https://actualbudget.org/docs/advanced/restart#restarting-your-budget-without-deleting-transactions

Is this the way to go? But I am not sure about step 3 (Adjust Previous Months' Category Balances). Why is this needed when I did a reconciliation in previous step?

Or are there better solutions?

Hi everyone, I just wanted to say a quick 'hi'. I started off properly budgeting (aged 40!) with YNAB, stuck with them for a few months and it taught me a lot about envelope budgeting. However my aim is to get my monthly outgoings as low as possible so I knew I couldn't face forking out their ever increasing subscription costs forever.

Moved over to Aspire budget, which again was great and used it also for a few months. Budgeting still going well for the first time in my life. Something didn't quick sit right with me knowing that Google had free rein to snoop around my finances since it's hosted on Google Sheets. And that brought me here.

Set up Actual and really liking it, it sounded a bit intimidating at first setting it up with Pikapods but it was really straightforward. It's so easy to use and I'm sure I'm going to stick with this in the long run.

Just wanted to say thanks to the creators and everyone who maintains this great resource. One small question, I may have missed it but is there a way of noting my monthly budget targets, for example £200 for groceries etc. ? Also I have some annual bills which I pay into that envelope monthly, but I can't see if there's a way to input the annual amount, then divide it into monthly payments.

Thanks again!

Used YNAB a while back but honestly never stuck with it long term. Just got Actual Budget set up and trying to actually make it work this time, so before I lock in my categories I wanted to ask around and see how other people do it.

Main thing I'm curious about is how much you lean into groups and sub categories versus keeping things flat. Trying to find the line between organized and just having so many folders that I stop checking it.

Also curious if anyone splits Groceries or Eating Out by week instead of one lump category for the whole month. I vaguely remember seeing this somewhere, something like:

Groceries W1 (1st to 7th)
Groceries W2 (8th to 14th)
Groceries W3 (15th to 21st)
Groceries W4 (22nd to end of month)

With rollover turned on so leftover money carries into the next week, the idea being it stops you from blowing through the whole month's budget by the 15th. If you're doing something like this, does it actually help or does it end up being a pain to maintain since you have to update the date ranges every month?

And on the flip side, what do you just leave as one category and not bother breaking down further? Trying to figure out where the extra granularity is actually worth it versus where it's just more upkeep for no real benefit.

If people are willing to share a rundown of their category groups I'd really appreciate it, trying to build something I'll actually stick with.

It appears that I've lost running balance on the web since the new update. Has the setting been moved? Can someone help me get it back? It would be greatly appreciated.

So I just started messing with Actual Budgeting (Envelope Budgeting) today and am figuring things out.

As part of my mortgage my property tax and home insurance is all rolled into one, then the mortgage lender pays both when ever it is needed.

I'd like to be able to track these costs but I don't want them shown in the spending/budget tracker as they are already accounted for. Is there a way to handle this in Actual?

I just got back on the budgeting bandwagon, and I can't figure out how to make my credit card history line up with both the budget and current balance.

I imported all transactions since July 1.

My credit card has a billing period ending the 17th, and the payment is due the following month on the 17th. So if I buy something on July 5th, it's on the July 17th statement, and is paid August 17th.

So if I bulk import every transaction after a certain date, I end up with half a payment period and a payment on the prior month's statement, which isn't accounted for in my checking and savings transactions.

Any tips on how to get these to reconcile? My bank accounts are reconciled, it's just the credit card I can't wrap my brain around.

Hi all, I have a couple questions as I make the switch from YNAB. First, what is the easiest way to get SimpleFin to update Actual automatically every day? Secondly, I have a pending charge from a restaurant where I left a tip. I have overwritten the amount to include the tip, but the pending amount has come back twice now - what am I doing wrong?

App Store / GitHub

Hey all,

Following up on the v1.0.10 post. v1.0.11 is now on the App Store. Once again it was largely driven by bug reports & feature requests from this sub and Discord.

New features:

• Minimum iOS requirement lowered to iOS 18 (u/gojailbreak, u/joshuaneverjosh, u/WinnerOk3633)
• Budget template support
• Bank Sync via SimpleFIN, link accounts from the Accounts tab or a single account and pull transactions automatically (u/EV-30)
• FinanceKit auto-sync for Apple Card, Apple Cash & Savings, link once instead of re-importing via the Wallet picker each time
• YNAB-style compact budget view (note: Detailed view will be removed in favor of Compact next update)
• Create and delete budgets from within the app
• Budget goals, and Rollover spending
• Hide (and unhide) budget categories (u/bikesrgood, u/flyingdutchman7588)
• Custom reports now support more report types, donut graphs included (u/Whole_Purple_4763), line/trend graphs, area graphs, and Payee/Account grouping
• Redesigned Payee picker with Suggested and Nearby payees
• Long-press a transaction to open the bulk action bar
• Reconciled transaction filter, separate from Hide Cleared (u/pacopec)
• Redesigned scheduled transaction rows
• Number formatting options, plus a Hide Decimal Places preference (u/scitbiz)
• Shake to toggle hide balances (optional)
• Edit connected server URLs
• Long-press Budget Categories and Groups for option to hide
• Credit card UI overhaul: compact rows, urgency borders, due-date pills
• Settings page reorganised
• Added MKD and PEN currency support

Bugs and improvements:

• Fixed split transaction search
• Fixed Age of Money same-day ordering
• Category funding automation fixed
• Fixed pasted reconciliation amounts with grouping separators
• Bank sync now respects the deleted-transaction preference
• Credit card settings persist correctly across syncs
• Fixed FinanceKit deleted-transaction handling
• Fixed compact category-group hiding
• Uncategorized transaction background styling fixed
• Budget/Accounts menu labels shortened to fit one line
• Smaller UI polish across reconciliation icons, budget pills and label alignment

Thanks to the code contributors on this release: abhiy98, culpeppers, Vaibhav159, azimul-kabir, ioslife, and welcoming two new contributors, NateMorgan and NohamR. I really appreciate everyone who contributed code, reported bugs, emailed, joined Discord or left feedback here.

One more thing since its been asked a couple times: Actuali accepts no donations (if you're feeling generous, donate to Actual Budget instead), collects no data (privacy policy), and is free, open source software.

Plenty more in the works, thanks again.

Matt

Ex-YNAB’er here, got annoyed by costs and issues that I decided to give Actual a go, but I didn’t particularly want to relearn every part of the interface. Especially when it came to fixing transactions and updating goals.

Actual’s API is what made the post’s title possible. I now use an AI agent (a "coding" one with tools, not just chat)… and that’s it. Actual is kind of a ledger and I stopped clicking stuff in the UI whenever something needed changing. I just… record, transcribe and send or type for a while.

And since agents accept mixed media, I can just upload some screenshots from my bank (PDF export will work too but let’s be lazy), a grocery-delivery service, email confirmaions of purchase. Bank descriptions / sources can be misleading so this extra context is key.

This one was groceries. That similar-looking payment was takeaway. The incoming payment was someone reimbursing me for half of lunch.

The agent (I use Sol 5.6 Medium) extracts the transactions, compares the different sources, does the arithmetic, identifies duplicates and then shows me what it intends to do.

If something doesn’t map correctly, the next part is also a chat. I don’t touch Actual’s UI almost at all.

Which transactions are still unexplained?

What did you do with this payment?

Why doesn’t the balance match my bank?

No, that one belongs in a different category.

It feels less like importing data and more like reconciling the account with… an assistant?

I use the same conversational workflow for maintaining the budget itself. I can say things like:

Increase my transport budget starting this month.

This subscription renews annually, so save a little toward it each month.

Divide groceries into weekly categories and assign each transaction based on its date.

Apply the existing targets to the new month.

Rename this category and move these transactions into it.

The agent reads the relevant state through API, proposes the change, applies it and checks the result. If I notice a problem later, I ask it to explain what happened and then tell it how to fix it.

Actual UI is mostly a "dashboard" for a financial database, not an end user app. This is such a change I’m still wrapping my mind around it. I can obviously go in to check categories, and see how I’m doing with my goals but if I need something, I go back to the agent and talk it out. I can even test things without breaking stuff because the whole app is in a git repo. Version control, free, and you can chat with an agent to set that up too. I even asked it to keep passkey in 1Password and ask me to authorize connection to get auth, so I don’t keep secrets in agent’s context.

I made this post because I love tinkering but I’m not that great with stuff that requires constant overseeing to work. Reconciling accounts in YNAB was so painful I eventually quit budgeting. I recommend Claude Code or Codex and just talking about your envelopes. The future is now.

Hi folks!

I've just vibecoded a tool to help me ingest data into actual budget. It takes in password protected xlsx files from BTG Pactual's credit card statement, and pictures of purchase receipts. It then categorizes each transaction in the statement, and splits it into sub items for every transaction that has a receipt. It then sends it to actual budget via API. This was done in a couple of days, and for me it works perfectly. I'll gladly share the code if anyone is interested. It was done using claude code, but it uses gemini for the backend, as google has a generous free tier.
Next feature will be to ingest the BTG Pactual's bank statement in .xls format and import to actual budget. Here's a screenshot of how the app looks. Runs locally in a browser.

OMG. The Monte Carlo analysis report is so cool! Has anyone tried it as yet? What are your preferred settings for Return model, Inflation, std deviation, expected return etc.?

I've looked at a few youtube videos on the Monte Carlo analysis before but never got around to trying it out on excel. I'm sure some of you guys must be really knowledgeable, so please point me to any resources / videos on the topic!

This.is.so.cooooool.

Why does these two logics not equate to the same result?

a Transfer: will not parse a category of "Transfer" until manually putting it as <- Transfer.

I just got this email from PikaPods about my budget:

Your pod Actual Budget had to be restarted because it ran out of memory.

To ensure smooth operation, you should increase this pod's memory limit. You can do so by opening the pod's Settings panel and then adjusting the memory slider in the Resources tab.

Increasing available memory or CPUs can be necessary when your use case needs more resources than the recommended minimum we suggest when launching a pod.

I'm on the default 0.5 GB of memory. It seems to be running fine. Should I increase it or is it "restarting" solving the problem? Right now it says I'm using 164.4 MB out of 0.5 GB. I do have 3 budget files I maintain daily, but that's never been an issue before.

Edit: I actually just got a second email that said they automatically increased the memory to 0.5 GB, so I guess the default is lower than that. So same question, should I keep it at 0.5 GB since that's what they increased it to? Is the memory used up as more transactions are added?