Budgeting apps love a subscription, and plenty of them want access to your bank account before they’ll show a single chart. Pocket Money Pro takes the opposite approach: you log what you spend and earn by hand, it keeps the running balance, and nothing leaves your own iCloud Drive.
Inside the shortcut
The home screen is built around a handful of options.
Overview shows your current balance and your four most recent transactions, with a button to copy the balance. Add Transaction logs a new entry in three steps. Transaction History goes further back than Overview, and tapping any entry opens an alert with everything recorded about it. Adjust Balance lets you correct the total when you’ve forgotten to log a few purchases. Settings covers update checks, pocket settings and feedback.
There’s no bank syncing and no charts. It’s a pocket ledger, closer to a paper notebook than a finance app, which is exactly the appeal if all you want is to know where this week’s money went.
What you need
- Shortcuts, built into iOS.
- iCloud Drive, which is required. Your records are kept there.
Getting it set up
Make sure iCloud Drive is turned on in Settings.
First run
Running the shortcut the first time opens a Setup screen. Work through it, and once the configuration is done you’ll see the Pocket Money Pro home screen. That’s your starting point from then on. If your opening balance isn’t zero, use Adjust Balance straight away so the numbers start from reality.
Running the shortcut
Logging an expense takes three taps and a number:
- Choose Expense or Income.
- Type the amount.
- Pick a category, or choose Others and type your own.
Overview gets more useful the more you log. A good habit is to add the purchase while you’re still at the till, because the hardest part of manual budgeting is remembering what you spent later. Adding a Home Screen icon or a Siri phrase like “log expense” keeps that to a few seconds.
Customizing it
Custom categories are the main lever. Typing your own under Others lets you track things like “coffee” or “kids” separately, which tells you more than a generic “food” bucket.
Where your data lives
Everything is stored in iCloud Drive, which is why the shortcut needs it switched on. That keeps your records off third-party servers and makes them available wherever your iCloud account is signed in.
FAQ
Can it connect to my bank?
It can’t, and that’s by design. Every transaction is entered by hand.
What if my balance drifts from what my bank shows?
Use Adjust Balance to set the correct figure. It records the adjustment, so you can see later when and why the total changed.
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