Automated spending tracking

I've always had a problem with tracking my spending. I used to use a "finance tracker" app, which allows me to enter transactions I've made. Unfortunately, I find it a bit of a hassle to use, and occasionally whenever I'm in a rush, I might forget to record certain purchases.

I could use credit card PDF statements at the end of each month and parse it out, but the problem is, I wouldn't know the "running total" before the statement is ready.

The Idea

Whenever possible, I use Apple Pay to, well, pay for things. It would usually send me notifications for payments that went through. I started to think if I can somehow capture these notifications and send it somewhere, maybe some kind of script, so that I can automatically record transactions. I don't think there's a way to fetch the notifications (unlike on Android), so I'd have to think of something else.

The next best idea I have is to take screenshots of the Apple Wallet transactions list, and get a script to parse them.

For example:

I'd send the screenshots somewhere, and my script would perform OCR to extract the text. Then, use some kind of pattern matching to parse name of shop, date, time, and amount.

I would then be able to save them into a CSV file for further processing.

Of course, there's still some effort needed to actually take the screenshots, but I figure it's much better than having to manually record down the transactions one at a time.

The Python script(s) is at this GitHub repo branch here. It's part of a larger project of finance tracking and dashboarding I worked on with a friend. There's still some finishing touches I'd have to make before merging with main branch, at time of writing this.

Additional Feature: Parsing Email Notifications

Aside from using my credit card, I often use PayNow QR codes to pay for things. My bank would send me email notifications for these payments, for example:

This is an additional form of input to complement the Apple Wallet screenshots.

Example Setup

Here's an example setup I've tried.

I setup a new Gmail account, that would store the Apple Pay screenshots. Once every few days, I open up my Apple Wallet app, take a screenshot, and email it to the Gmail account as an attachment. Additionally, I've configured a forwarding rule on my primary email account, to send the PayNow QR transactions to the special Gmail account.

One of the scripts I have would retrieve the emails from that account, and download the images to a local directory. Another script can be used to scan the images, parse the transactions, and output a CSV file.

Here's a visualization of the system: