Smart Expense Entry: Track Expenses by Simply Typing With Vaulty

Most expense tracker apps ask you to fill in a form for every transaction: amount, then merchant, then category, then account, then payment method. Five fields for one cup of tea. No wonder logging expenses starts to feel like a chore.

But you already know how to describe what happened. You'd tell a friend "had tea with the team at Starbucks, ₹840, paid from HDFC". Vaulty's Smart Entry lets you write it just like that, in one line, and turns it into a transaction you can check before saving.

See Smart Entry in action

In this 30-second clip, three transactions are typed into Smart Entry, reviewed, corrected and saved.

Read the transcript

Money doesn't always come as a neat transaction. Sometimes, you just type what happened.

Got ten thousand from Ramesh for freelance work. Had tea with the team at Starbucks. And spent five hundred on fuel.

Vaulty turns it into organized transactions. Just review, and save.

Your money. Automatically organized.

[On screen: Vaulty. Free on Android.]

What is Smart Entry?

Smart Entry is a way to add transactions to Vaulty by describing them in plain words instead of filling in a form. You'll find it on the Home screen, and as the Smart Entry tab when you add a transaction.

You type what happened, one transaction per line, and tap Analyze. Vaulty works out the amount, whether it's income or an expense, the category and the account, and prepares a draft transaction for each line. Nothing is saved until you've seen the drafts and chosen to save them.

Just type what happened

There's no special format to learn. Write the way you'd write a note to yourself, and include the details you care about:

• the amount, like ₹500
• what it was for, like fuel, tea or freelance work
• where the money went or came from, like "from HDFC Savings" or "to SBI Bank"

Naming the account with "from" or "to" helps Vaulty pick the right one. You can put several transactions in the box at once, one per line, and each line becomes its own draft.

The three examples from the video

These are the exact lines typed in the video:

Got ₹10,000 freelance income from Ramesh to SBI Bank
Had tea with the team at Starbucks ₹840 from HDFC Savings
Fuel ₹500 for my bike from HDFC Credit Card

And this is what Vaulty prepared from them on the Review Transactions screen:

Each draft gets a short title made from what you typed. At the top of the screen, Vaulty shows an estimated total: ₹1,340 in expenses and ₹10,000 in income.

These are the results from this demonstration. With different wording, merchants or accounts, Vaulty may fill in less, or suggest something you'd change. That's why the next step exists.

Review before you save

Smart Entry doesn't quietly add anything to your records. Every line becomes a draft on the Review Transactions screen, where you can see:

• the amount, type, category, account and payment method Vaulty picked
• a confidence score for each draft
• a pencil icon to edit the draft, and a bin icon to remove it

If something is missing or doesn't look right, fix it here before saving. A draft can only be saved once it has an amount, an account and a category.

Correcting the payment method

The video shows one correction, and it's worth being clear about why.

The fuel line names the account, HDFC Credit Card, and Vaulty matched it. But Smart Entry doesn't pick up how you paid from what you type, so it suggested UPI, as it did for the other two lines.

The fuel was paid by card, so in the video the draft is opened with the pencil icon, Payment Method is changed from UPI to Card, and the draft collapses again with "Card" at the end of its details line. That's the whole fix: three taps, no retyping.

That's the idea behind Smart Entry: type it naturally, review what Vaulty understood, correct anything you need, and save. When you save a correction, Smart Entry can remember it for similar entries later, so you'll often have less to fix the next time.

Save everything in one tap

Once the drafts look right, tap Save All. In the video, Vaulty confirms "Saved 3 transactions" and goes back to Home. All three then show up in Activity under Today: the freelance income, the Starbucks tea and the fuel, now marked Card.

Your account balances update to match. The income goes into SBI Bank, the tea comes out of HDFC Savings, and the fuel is added to what you owe on the credit card.

Why this is faster than manual entry

With a form, every transaction is a sequence of taps: type the amount, type the merchant, open the category list, find the right one, pick the account, pick the payment method, save. Then start again for the next one.

With Smart Entry:

1. Type a line for each transaction, all in one box.
2. Analyze once.
3. Review the drafts and fix anything that's off.
4. Save All.

Three transactions, one screen, one save. The fields still get filled in, but you only touch the ones Vaulty didn't get right.

Built for everyday spending

Smart Entry suits the transactions that never come with a neat record:

• cash payments, which never send you an SMS
• money you receive, like freelance income
• small everyday spends, like tea, snacks, autos and fuel
• catching up at the end of the day, when you can type everything you remember in one go

If you'd rather talk than type, the Smart Entry box also has a microphone button.

For payments that do send you a bank SMS, Vaulty can pick those up too. Our guide on turning bank SMS into transactions shows how. Just don't add the same payment both ways, or it will be counted twice. And if your money moves through several UPI apps, read how to track all your UPI spending in one place.

Try Vaulty

Tired of filling in forms to track your expenses?

Try Vaulty Smart Entry. Type what happened, review what Vaulty understood, and save it in a tap. Vaulty is free on Android.

Get Vaulty on Google Play

You can also read more about Vaulty or browse more guides on the Vaulty blog.

Video transcript

The full voice-over from the Smart Entry demo above:

Money doesn't always come as a neat transaction. Sometimes, you just type what happened. Got ten thousand from Ramesh for freelance work. Had tea with the team at Starbucks. And spent five hundred on fuel. Vaulty turns it into organized transactions. Just review, and save. Your money. Automatically organized.

The video ends on the words "Vaulty. Free on Android" shown on screen.