Every road into the ledger, and where they meet

Household tracking does not die because the numbers are hard. It dies because entering them is a chore, and the chore wins. So Cifrea gives you several ways to get a transaction in, and the right question is not “which one is best” but “which one fits the moment”.

This is the map. Six roads, what each is for, and the one rule that keeps them from colliding.

The rule first: everything lands in Approvals

Whatever the road, a transaction that Cifrea captured for you does not go straight into your ledger. It waits in Approvals, with the amount, the merchant and the account it thinks it belongs to, until you say yes.

That is not caution for its own sake. It is what lets several roads run at once. If a purchase arrives twice, once as a bank text and once as a tap, Approvals shows you the pair and you keep one. If a merchant name is nonsense, you fix it before it becomes a row. Nothing you did not approve is ever in a total.

Two things to know about the queue. It is one queue for the whole household, so either of you can clear it. And a red dot on Transactions tells you something is waiting, on every device, within seconds of an approval on any other.

Road 1. By hand, for the moment you remember

The plain “add a transaction” form. Type, account, amount, category, date, a note, a receipt if you want one.

On the phone the amount has its own keypad, so a coffee is four taps. There is a Save & new button for the second and third coffee. On the Mac it is the same form with a typed amount.

Use it for the things no machine sees: cash, a loan to a friend, a refund that came as store credit, the balance of a jar. It is also the road that never breaks, because nothing is between you and the row.

Road 2. Several at once, when you have a list

“Add several” is the same form laid out as a grid: one row per transaction, tab from cell to cell, save them all together. It exists for the Sunday evening pile: the week’s receipts, the notes in your pocket, the six things you photographed and never entered.

It is faster than the single form once you have more than three. Below that, the single form wins.

Road 3. Scan a receipt

Point the camera at a receipt, or pick a photo, and Cifrea reads the merchant, the date and the total. The read happens on your device, and the image is not uploaded anywhere. What you get is a pre-filled form, not a saved row, so a bad read costs you a correction rather than a wrong number in a total.

Receipts are the road for anything paid where no other road reaches: a restaurant abroad, a market, a tradesperson paid in cash.

Road 4. Bank texts, the one that changes the habit

Every time you tap a card, your bank sends you a text with the amount, the merchant and the last digits of the card. A Shortcut on your phone forwards that text to your household, Cifrea parses it, and the transaction appears in Approvals before you have put the card away.

Cifrea never talks to your bank for this. No login, no token, no third party. The text your bank already sent you is the whole input, and if the Shortcut stops, the texts stop, and nothing else changes.

Two fields make it work: a key per phone, made on the phone it belongs to, and a mapping from the card’s last digits to one of your accounts. The full setup is its own article. For most households this is the road that carries eighty percent of the month.

Road 5. Apple Pay taps, for the card that does not text

Some cards text, some do not. For the ones that do not, a Wallet automation catches the contactless tap itself: amount, merchant, card, currency, straight from the phone that made the payment. Cifrea maps the card to an account the first time and remembers.

It catches only taps made with that phone. A card inserted at a terminal, a number typed into a website, a direct debit and your salary all take a different road. And when a tap and a bank text describe the same purchase, Approvals shows them as one, because the amount, the account and the minute match.

Road 6. Files: statements and broker PDFs

For history, for a month you missed, or for an account that sends nothing to your phone, import the file.

A bank statement as CSV goes through the statement importer, which shows you every row before it writes one. The dates, the sign of each amount and the overlap with what you already hold are the three things to check, and that article walks through all six ways an import goes wrong.

A broker’s monthly PDF goes through the broker importer instead. It does not create transactions. It reads each holding’s quantity and month-end value, so the balance sheet shows your portfolio at every month end without you typing a single price.

Coming: a bank connection

We are testing a direct bank connection through Plaid, in a sandbox with test banks. It lands transactions in the same Approvals queue as everything above, with the same duplicate check, so nothing about the habit changes when it arrives. It is not in the app you can download today, and it will not cover every bank when it does; the texts and the taps are built to stay.

Which road, when

Where they meet

Every road ends in Approvals, and every approved row carries where it came from. Open a transaction and the source is on it: typed, scanned, from a text, from a tap, from a file. That is what lets you trust a total months later, when you cannot remember the coffee but can see how it got there.

Pick the roads that fit your cards and your habits, set them up once, and let the queue do the remembering.