This New iOS 17 Shortcut Will Help You Keep Track of Your Spending (and more)

This year’s iOS 17 release may not add the same “tentpole” features that we’ve seen over the past few years, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be an exciting release in its own way. There are dozens of cool little improvements that will add up to make iOS 17 a bigger overall upgrade than the sum of its parts.

We’ve already covered the biggest features Apple announced at WWDC, plus some other nifty features Apple didn’t announce and a list of small but useful improvements.

However, even those roundups are just the tip of the iceberg. As we play with the iOS 17 betas, we’re discovering other new and exciting tidbits each day.

Over the weekend, I stumbled upon a small feature that we haven’t heard much about yet that could turn out to be very useful for folks who like to keep track of their spending. However, it goes beyond that, opening up a whole new world of automation routines triggered by what you do in Apple Wallet.

New ‘Transaction’ Triggers in Shortcuts

If you haven’t tried Apple’s Shortcuts app yet, you really should. It’s one of the most powerful features on your iPhone that lets you automate nearly anything you can imagine.

In its simplest form, Shortcuts lets you put a button on your home screen to perform a sequence of tasks, which could be anything from setting up some pre-defined reminders to building song playlists or resizing and sending out images from your photo library.

However, Shortcuts also packs in some powerful triggers that can be used to automate these routines when something happens on or with your iPhone. For instance, you can have a shortcut run at a scheduled time of day, when you arrive at or leave a particular location, or even when you receive a specific text message or connect to Bluetooth or CarPlay in your car.

Now, iOS 17 is adding another powerful new trigger to this already extensive list of options: Transaction.

This will allow you to run a routine whenever you tap a card or pass from Apple Wallet. It’s not limited to Apple Pay transactions, either; it supports every type of tappable card you can store in Wallet, including transit cards, digital keys for home, office, and hotels, and — if you’re fortunate enough to live in a place that supports it — your digital driver’s license or other government-issued ID.

As with other triggers in Shortcuts, you can run any routine you like after you tap your Wallet card. However, the trigger also passes information about the transaction to the next step. In the case of Apple Pay, this includes the card used, the store where you used it, and the transaction amount.

This will make it easy to keep an ongoing record of your purchases. For example, you could log new purchases to a spreadsheet or add them to a note in the Notes app.

You can also pass this info on to any other app, so if you have a finance app that supports Shortcuts, you could record the transaction directly in there as soon as you make the purchase, saving you the trouble of keying it in manually later.

Even better, the new Transaction trigger allows you to filter based on the card used, the category of purchase, and even the merchant you made the purchase at. This could let you track only grocery purchases, for example, or only purchases made at a specific coffee shop.

Thinking in broader terms, though, since this trigger can run any series of actions, this goes well beyond just logging your purchases. You could create a reminder to separate and freeze your meat after you buy something at your local butcher shop or automatically open your calorie-tracking app when you’ve picked up a treat at the bakery.

This also applies to other card types like transit cards and office passes, opening up even more exciting possibilities. Some examples that come to mind are logging the time that you got on the subway or clocked in at work, sending out a message to a loved one when you board the train to commute home or clear the TSA security checkpoint before your flight, or setting a timer for when the free transfer window will expire for your transit pass. Like most shortcuts, the possibilities are almost endless, and it will be interesting to see what folks come up with once iOS 17 is out in the wild.