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Improvements for Shortcuts Actions

Budget Flow💡 Feature Requests

I use a Shortcut to help me log expenses automatically, triggered by SMS automation, OCR-based text recognition from screenshots, or GPT-powered image and text analysis. Sometimes, I can determine the category automatically, but other times I can’t.

Right now, I set the category as a variable and manually adjust it later. If there were an action that returned a list of categories, I could select one when the category isn’t automatically determined (of course, I could manually create a list, but that’s less convenient).

Additionally, since the type field in the “Create Transaction” action doesn’t support variables, I have to use an if condition to create two separate “Create Transaction” actions instead of handling everything within one action. Allowing variables in the type field would make the process much more seamless.

Posted by Neurogram ·
Status: In Progress6 comments

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Comments6

  • Rafal

    •

    Oct 2

    hey @Fabian

    I see this one is in progress, so perhaps I could add my few cents to it, that wont overcomplicate things.

    With the recent addition of the trigger from notification, what I would love to see, is some way to list transactions via a shortcut, and to “act” on them. Sure we can use now AI cloud models to try to categorize the transaction, but the titles Im getting are often impossible to categorize. A workflow that could do the trick here, is to simply put all the uncategorized transactions under one category (or no category), and have a shortcut that will “go over” them, asking for each one to update it.

    Sooo, my request would be about a shortcut to list transactions (by category, or other means), and a one that can do changes to such transaction found on the list 🙇

  • Neurogram

    •

    Sep 14

    Hi, @Fabian
    I noticed that this post was marked as Completed today, but as far as I can tell, neither of the suggested improvements has been implemented:

    1. An action that returns the list of available categories.

    2. Support for variables in the “Type” field of the “Create Transaction” action.

    Could you please clarify why the post was marked as Completed? If these features have been added, could you let me know how to access or use them? Thank you!

    • Fabian

      Team•

      Sep 20

      Hi @Neurogram,
      Thanks for pointing this out!

      There isn't currently an action that returns the complete list of available categories, but you can search for categories. The main reason I marked this as completed is that, since version 3.3.0, categories can now be searched for and, with the new Create actions, automatically created if they don't exist yet.

      You're also right that the Type field itself doesn't support variables. However, since version 3.3.0, you can simply leave it empty. Budget Flow will then automatically determine the transaction type based on the amount: a negative amount will be treated as an expense, while a positive amount will be treated as income.

      Does that cover your use case? If not, I'm happy to move this back to In Progress and add the action for retrieving the full list of categories as well.

      Best regards,

      Fabian

      • Neurogram

        •

        Sep 20

        Hi @Fabian ,

        Thanks for the clarification! Leaving the Type field empty and letting Budget Flow determine the transaction type from the amount does cover that part of my use case, so that’s a great improvement.

        For the categories, though, I think an action that retrieves the existing list would still be very useful for my workflow.

        My Shortcut automation currently works roughly like this:

        • For transactions triggered by SMS or notifications, I use regex and JavaScript to parse the content. If the account, amount, category, and tags can be matched reliably, the transaction is created automatically. If something can’t be determined, I select it manually.
        • For content that can’t be parsed reliably — for example, certain SMS/notifications, clipboard content, etc. — I send the content to an AI model together with the available accounts, categories, and tags, and ask it to return the appropriate values.

        Because of this, what I really need is a way for Shortcuts to retrieve the accounts, categories, tags, etc. that are already configured in Budget Flow.

        Automatically creating a category when it doesn’t exist isn’t ideal for this workflow, since AI classification isn’t always correct. I’d rather give the AI the existing categories as a fixed set of options and have it choose from those, instead of allowing an incorrect result to create a new category.

        Currently, because there are no actions to retrieve these lists, I manually maintain Text actions in my Shortcut containing all of my Budget Flow accounts, categories, and tags. This works, but every time I add, rename, or remove something in Budget Flow, I also need to update the Shortcut manually.

        So if possible, I’d still really appreciate actions that return the existing accounts, categories, and tags (or perhaps a more general way to retrieve these entities). That would allow the Shortcut to always use the current Budget Flow configuration as the source of truth.

        Thanks again for looking into this!

  • uebelmc95

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    Jul 24

    Since IOS27 Beta dropped, i played around with the notification trigger to start a shortcut. There I wanted to setup a shortcut which recogniced the notification of my Bank App. I went quiet far, to Split the Text in income and outcome, the number and the description Text.

    So what I had tried is that the cloud model categorized it e.g „supermarket“, „fuel“ etc.

    So I used the action „search category“ to check whether the category exist. That’s to be sure that the category exist, that one just throws an exception and ends the shortcut. Would be nice to have here an exporting like „blank“ to ne able to recognize. And further, would be great to have an action to create the category if it‘s not existing.

    That would help a lot to do a fully automated tracking of the expanses.

  • ALEJANDRO LÓPEZ ALBERTOS

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    Mar 15, 2025

    I cant upvote this enough