Widgets, privacy and your account
Siri, Shortcuts and Apple Pay in Penge
Penge answers five ready-made Siri phrases and offers nineteen actions to the Shortcuts app. There is also a beta automation that carries Apple Pay purchases into the app.
What can you ask Siri?
Five phrases work without building anything: What is my balance in Penge, How much have I spent in Penge, What is left to categorize in Penge, Add a transaction in Penge, and Open Penge. The phrases exist in English only, whatever language your app is set to.
The three that answer with a figure need at least one account first. With none, the reply is Open Penge and connect an account first.
Build a Shortcut with Penge actions
In the Shortcuts app, create a shortcut, tap Add Action and search for Penge. The action names are translated even though the spoken Siri phrases are not.
- Balances: Get Balance and Get Accounts.
- Spending: Get Spending, Get Spending on Category, Get Spending on Tag, Get Top Spending Categories, Get Top Spending Tags and Get Monthly Total.
- Budgets, tags and categories: Get Budget, Get Budgets, Get Tags and Get Categories.
- Transactions: Find Transactions, Add Transaction, Categorize Transaction and Get Number of Uncategorized Transactions.
- Opening a screen: Open Penge, Open Budget and Open Transaction.
Good to know
- Find Transactions is the only action that needs the phone unlocked. The ones that return a figure work on the Lock Screen on purpose, because the widgets already put those numbers there.
- Categorize Transaction queues the change the same way the widget does. Penge saves it the next time it runs.
- Get Spending offers day ranges from Today to This year. The category, tag and monthly actions read stored monthly statistics, so they offer only This month, Last month and This year.
- Every Get action recomputes from your data when it runs, so an automation reports today's figures rather than what a widget last showed.
- With Hide amounts on, Siri reads the masked amount aloud, but the number a shortcut receives stays exact.
Import Apple Pay purchases (beta)
Penge has an action called Import transactions from Apple Pay / Wallet, meant to be driven by an iOS Transaction automation so card taps land in the app. The app labels the whole feature Beta and says so twice on screen.
- Open the Settings tab and, under Experimental, tap Apple Pay automation.
- Tap How do I retrieve transactions from Apple Pay? at the bottom and keep the guide open.
- In the Shortcuts app, open the Automations tab, create a new automation and pick Transaction from the trigger list.
- Check all your accounts, leave every category checked, switch to Run Immediately and tap Next.
- Choose New Blank Automation, tap Add Action, search for Penge and add Import transactions from Apple Pay / Wallet.
- Set Card or Pass, Name and Amount to Shortcut Input, then map each one to the matching field and tap Done.
- After your next card tap, the purchase appears under Apple Pay automation as Awaiting configuration. Connect that Wallet card to a bank account.
Good to know
- The app states plainly that not all Apple Pay transactions are retrieved, and recommends the automation as a supplement to entering transactions yourself.
- Nothing becomes a real transaction until the Wallet card is connected to a bank account.
- A failed import can still look like a success in Shortcuts, so check the account afterwards rather than trusting the automation ran.
- This is unrelated to the Add Transaction action, which only opens the manual entry sheet.
Get a full overview with Penge
Connect your bank and let the app categorize and budget automatically.
Questions about this
- Can I ask Siri in Norwegian, Swedish or Danish?
- No. The five phrases are written in English in the app and there is no translated set, so a Norwegian sentence will not trigger them. The actions themselves are translated, so a Shortcut you build works the same whatever language your phone is in.
- Does a shortcut read the same numbers as my widget?
- Not always. A shortcut recalculates when it runs, while a widget shows the last snapshot. Get Top Spending Categories also counts all spending as its whole, where the Top Categories widget counts only categorized spending, so the two shares can differ.
- Does the Apple Pay automation replace a bank connection?
- No. It is a beta supplement for cards you tap in the shops, not a source of statements or balances. Connecting the bank itself is still what keeps your accounts, balances and history complete.