Using the app

Budget Tracker shows you what your bank's alert emails add up to. That is useful, and it is not the same thing as what you have spent. This page is about the difference.

The totals can be too low, and nothing on screen will say so

This is the limitation worth understanding, because it is invisible. Every other kind of error announces itself; this one looks like a smaller number.

Your bank may not email about everything

Alerts are a notification setting, not a ledger. Depending on the bank and how your alerts are configured, a purchase may generate no email at all — common for small contactless taps, pre-authorisations, recurring subscriptions and anything below an alert threshold you have set. The app cannot show what it was never told.

A bank may send a kind of alert the app does not recognise

Each bank is described by a pattern that matches a particular alert format. A bank that sends several different kinds of alert — one wording for a card purchase, another for a card-not-present authorisation, another for a declined transaction — may have only some of them recognised. The rest are read as unrecognised mail and do not appear in your totals.

A bank may change its wording

When that happens the pattern stops matching and the spending stops being recorded. The app watches for this and will tell you when alerts from a bank you turned on are no longer being read — but it needs a few failures before it is confident enough to say so, and until then the total is quietly short.

Some figures are inferred rather than read

Where a card sends no alerts of its own, the app may estimate its spending from a related source — for example, order confirmation emails from a retailer whose card it is. These are marked in the app. They are an estimate of what was charged, not a record of it: a cancelled order, a split shipment, a changed payment method or tax and delivery differences will all make the figure wrong.

What it does not do

• It does not connect to your bank, and it holds no banking credentials. It reads email, nothing else.
• It cannot move money, change an account, or alter anything at your bank.
• It cannot change your mailbox. The permission it asks Google for is read-only, enforced by Google rather than by the app behaving well.
• It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any bank or card issuer. Bank names appear only to label which alerts are being read.

Bank list updates

The app can fetch a bank list from this site describing how to read each bank's alerts. It is optional and off until you turn it on, and there are two separate switches: one to allow updates at all, and one to allow a check once a day without being asked.

The list is public, identical for every user, and contains nothing about you. Fetching it sends a version number and nothing else — no account, no address, none of your mail.

Each list is signed, and the app refuses one whose signature does not verify against a key built into the app. A list cannot switch a bank on; new banks always arrive off, and reading a new sender is always your decision. You can read the current list and its signature yourself — it is deliberately plain text.

Your data

Everything the app extracts stays on your phone, and you can delete it from inside the app at any time. The privacy policy sets out exactly what is kept, what is discarded, and what is never collected.

No warranty

Budget Tracker is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or accuracy. You are responsible for your own financial decisions, and for checking anything that matters against your bank's own records. To the extent permitted by law, Sahadeo Solutions is not liable for any loss arising from use of the app or from reliance on figures it displays.

Nothing here limits rights you have under consumer law that cannot be waived.