You are at the till. The receipt is in your hand, the card is going back in the wallet, and the expense has about ten seconds before you forget it. The spreadsheet row at the end of the month is the thing that does not happen. The app I am considering is for those ten seconds: open, amount, category, photo of the receipt, done, with the row already in your Notion database by the time you reach the car.
Fast Actions for Notion can do a version of this today. You build an action with an amount, a category and a photo field and it logs the expense in three taps. I described the set-up in an expense tracker in Notion from your phone. What a dedicated app would add is the parts a general form cannot: a currency field for trips abroad, a number pad that opens first, and a widget with this month’s total next to what you planned to spend.
How it would work
- A separate app, not a mode in Fast Actions, with its own Notion database template: amount (number), category (select), currency (select), date, note, receipt (files), paid with (select or relation).
- Entries are rows created through the Notion API. The receipt photo goes through Notion’s file upload into the Files property, downscaled first so it stays under the 5 MiB limit of free workspaces.
- The monthly totals widget would query the database a few times a day, add up the rows on the phone and show the total per category. Notion’s formulas and rollups are read-only through the API, so the template’s own totals stay in Notion and the widget does its own sum.
- Offline queue like Fast Actions: entries wait and upload when there is signal, each with a status.
- Pulling in bank transactions is not part of this. It would be manual entry at the till, by design, because that is the part Notion cannot do from a phone.
If you are in Japan or Korea you may have noticed there is almost no 家計簿 or 가계부 app that writes to Notion. That is the gap this would fill, and it is also why I am asking rather than building. The general budget apps are very good, and I want to know how many people would pick a Notion database over them.
Is this built?
No. It is a plan and a database template. Until it exists, Fast Actions is the way to do this. The button below counts as a vote; the more votes, the sooner this moves up the list.