Tap to pay is when you can tap your credit card, phone, or smart watch to finalize a transaction. It’s convenient! It’s also easy to impulse spend and lose track of your budget.
What are your experiences with tracking tap to pay in Tiller? Have you found any specific tips or tricks that work well for you? Share your thoughts and help other community members!
The convenience is amazing when you’re in line or just want to get going quickly. But because it’s so fast and almost feels frictionless, it can make it harder to really feel the money leaving your account. Unlike handing over cash or even taking the moment to insert your card and type a PIN, tapping can happen so quickly that it doesn’t quite register the same way mentally.
This can definitely lead to those impulse buys sneaking into our spending without us even realizing it until later. And when you do it multiple times a day or week, it gets really easy to lose track of where those little (or not so little!) taps are adding up. It creates that frustrating feeling of looking at your statement and wondering, “Seriously, where did all that money go this month?!”
This challenge of the “invisible outflow” from quick digital payments is exactly what Tiller is designed to help with! Tiller connects directly to your banks and credit cards to automatically pull every single transaction into your spreadsheet each day. Yes, that includes all your tap to pay purchases!
Seeing every tap, swipe, and online order laid out clearly in your own sheet is powerful. You get the vendor name, the date, and the exact amount, so there’s no more guessing or forgetting. It brings all those scattered transactions into one clear, organized view, putting you back in charge of seeing where your money is truly going.
Here are some ways Tiller can help you keep tabs on those convenient taps and prevent them from becoming budget headaches:
- Check Hello, Money Daily: Tiller’s daily email gives you a quick snapshot of your latest transactions. Scan it in the morning to catch those taps from the day before while they’re still fresh in your memory. If you haven’t already, go to the Tiller Console and customize Hello, Money to include your recent transactions.
- Use AutoCat for Regular Spots: Do you tap and pay often at the same coffee shop or grocery store? Set up an AutoCat rule for that vendor to automatically categorize those transactions as soon as they come in. Saves time and keeps things organized!
- Review Transaction Descriptions: Sometimes the description for a tap to pay transaction might look slightly different than a regular card swipe from the same place. Get familiar with how they appear for your accounts in Tiller so you can easily recognize them.
- Build a “Quick Spend” Report: Use your Tiller spreadsheet’s filtering or reporting features to quickly see all transactions from categories where you often use tap to pay (like “Dining Out,” “Groceries,” “Coffee Shops”). Seeing the total for the month can be really insightful and help you adjust if needed.
The great thing is, you don’t have to give up the convenience of tap to pay to have clarity. With Tiller, you get both! It helps turn those potentially invisible taps into visible data you can understand and act on.
-Alice
Tiller Evangelist