Skip to content 
Track expenses on WhatsApp
You write "lunch 12 bucks" to the bot and the expense is logged, with its category and its date. Voice notes and receipt photos work too.
In AI Money you log an expense by sending the bot a WhatsApp message, the way you would tell a friend: “lunch 12 bucks”. Text works, so does a voice note of up to 30 seconds, so does a photo of the receipt. The model pulls out the amount, the category, the date and the merchant, replies with what it understood, and the transaction shows up in the app. The free plan allows 2 entries a day and 10 images a day; Pro removes both limits. Linking your number takes about a minute and happens in Settings, with a 6-character code.
How do you log an expense through WhatsApp?
You write to the bot the way you would write to anyone else. There are no commands, no fixed format and no keywords to memorize. A message that says “paid 12 for lunch” and one that says “lunch 12” end up as the same transaction.
Here is what actually happens. You send “groceries 84.20 at Trader Joe’s”. The bot reads it, picks up 84.20, files it under Groceries, dates it today and stores “Trader Joe’s” as the title of the movement. It replies with those four fields so you can see what it understood. You open the app and the expense is already in your list, counting against this month’s Groceries budget.
Income works the same way: “got paid 2400 salary” is stored as income, not as an expense. And past dates are respected, so “yesterday I spent 40 on gas” is filed under yesterday rather than today.
What can you send the bot, and what does the free plan allow?
Three ways in, plus two operations on what you already logged. Free plan limits are counted per day and reset at midnight in your own time zone.
| What you send | What it does | Free plan | Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| A text message | Extracts amount, category, date and merchant, and saves the transaction | 2 a day | No limit |
| A voice note | Transcribes it and treats it as if you had typed it | Up to 30 seconds, inside the 2 daily entries | Up to 30 seconds, no limit on how many |
| A photo of a receipt | Reads the bill and pulls out the total and the merchant | 10 images a day, inside the 2 daily entries | No limit |
| “change it to 30” | Corrects the last movement: amount, category, title, date, currency or type | Included | Included |
| “delete it” | Shows you the transaction and waits for a “yes” before removing it | Included | Included |
The bot reads and replies in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, and picks the language from your phone number’s country code.
Do people really log expenses by chat?
Fair question, because on paper almost every logging method sounds convenient. We have the measured comparison between channels inside AI Money, and chat wins by a wide margin.
Over the 30 days to 27 July 2026, WhatsApp recorded more than thirteen times as many transactions as the automatic bank-SMS reader, which is the other channel that works without the user doing anything. The busiest single day passed 300 entries. Internal AI Money measurement.
The reason is dull, which is why it holds up: WhatsApp is already open. Logging an expense there does not mean switching apps, waiting for a screen to load, or trying at night to remember everything you bought during the day.
How do you link your WhatsApp number to the app?
You do it once, from inside the app, in three steps.
- In AI Money, open Settings and choose to link WhatsApp. The app shows a 6-character code.
- Tap the button and the chat with the bot opens with the code already typed. Send it as it is.
- The bot checks the code against your account and confirms in the same chat. From then on, anything you send it is saved to your account.
The code expires after 5 minutes. If you get distracted and it lapses, go back to Settings and ask for another one; there is no penalty and no waiting period. The phone you write from does not have to be the one running the app either, because what gets linked is the number, not the device.
Which account does a chat expense land in?
By default it lands in your main account, whichever one you marked as such in the app. If you keep several accounts and want to choose from the chat, Settings has a “WhatsApp accounts” switch that lets you pick which ones the bot should know about.
For the accounts you pick, the bot receives only the name, the alias if you set one, and the currency. Balances never leave the phone, and neither do the last four digits of a card. That is enough for the bot to know that “Chase” and “Amex” are two different accounts and to ask which one the expense belongs to.
What if the AI picks the wrong category?
It does get things wrong, and it is better to say so before you find out yourself. Merchants with ambiguous names are what confuse it most: a pharmacy that also sells groceries, a restaurant named like a clothing store, a charge that shows up under a holding company rather than the brand on the door.
You fix it in the same chat, without opening the app. Write “no, that was health” or “change it to 30” and the bot updates the last movement and confirms how it ended up. It can change the amount, the category, the title, the date, the currency, and even whether it was an expense or income. To remove something you write “delete it”: the bot shows you the full transaction and waits for a “yes” before deleting anything, so a stray message will not wipe the wrong record.
Is it safe to send your spending to a WhatsApp bot?
It depends on what worries you, so here are the three parts separately and without hedging.
What you send does get processed off the phone. The text of the message, the transcript of the voice note and the receipt photo travel to an AI Money server and from there to OpenAI, which is the model that interprets the sentence. Without that step there is no extraction: what turns “lunch 12” into a categorized movement is precisely the model. The app’s privacy policy discloses it.
Your history, on the other hand, lives on your phone. The transaction list is stored in a local database. Cloud backup exists, it is a switch in Settings and it is part of Pro, so if you never turn it on, your movements are not copied to any server.
And nobody can message the bot pretending to be you. Every event arriving from the WhatsApp webhook is checked against Meta’s cryptographic signature before it touches your account, so a message that did not come from WhatsApp’s own infrastructure is discarded before it is processed.
How is this different from a bot that writes to a spreadsheet?
Two ways of tracking money by chat exist side by side today, and the practical difference is not the bot. It is where the history ends up.
There are services that live entirely inside WhatsApp and write the result to a Google Sheet or a web dashboard. ExpenseTracker.io works that way, TallyMsg covers both WhatsApp and Telegram, and Feon, POQT and Moneko sit in the same space, alongside a good number of self-hosted n8n templates. You install nothing, and that is the appeal. In exchange, seeing your month means opening the sheet, and things like per-category budgets, savings goals or a home screen widget either do not exist or arrive as a separate dashboard.
The other model is AI Money’s: chat is a door into a full app. What you send through WhatsApp lands in the same ledger you use when you log something by hand, and everything else comes out of that. Budgets, savings pockets with goals, debts with real interest accrual, reports, exports to Excel and PDF, and widgets on the phone. That is more app than someone who just wants to jot down four expenses needs, and it is exactly what someone who has spent months trying to make the month add up is after.
When is another option a better fit?
Two specific cases where we are not the answer, so you do not waste an afternoon.
If you would rather not install an app at all, a service that lives only in the chat fits that idea better than we do. And if what you need is to settle who owes whom after a trip with friends, this is not it either: AI Money has a shared fund for couples, with contributions and shared expenses, but it does not keep a debt ledger between several people.
What does WhatsApp expense tracking cost?
Getting started costs nothing and no card is asked for. On the free plan you log 2 transactions a day through WhatsApp, with voice notes and the 10 daily images counted inside that allowance. Inside the app, transactions you type by hand are unlimited, and so are categories and budgets.
AI Money Pro removes the daily chat limit and adds the other hands-off channels. In the United States it costs 3.99 dollars a month or 32.99 a year; everywhere else the price is set by each app store, and the app shows it in your currency before you confirm anything.
Frequently asked questions about tracking expenses on WhatsApp
You link your number once from Settings, using a 6-character code that you send to the bot, and after that you write the expense in plain language, for example ‘lunch 12 bucks’. The bot extracts the amount, the category, the date and the merchant, replies with what it understood, and the transaction appears in the app. It also accepts voice notes of up to 30 seconds and photos of receipts.
Two a day on the AI Money free plan, with no card and no trial that expires. Voice notes fit inside that allowance and can run up to 30 seconds, and receipt photos have their own separate cap of 10 images a day. AI Money Pro removes the daily entry limit.
Yes, without opening the app. Writing something like ‘change it to 30’ or ‘that was health’ makes the bot update the last movement and confirm the result: it can change the amount, the category, the title, the date, the currency and whether it was an expense or income. To remove one you write ‘delete it’, and the bot shows you the full transaction and waits for a ‘yes’ before deleting it.
The message you send it, and nothing else from your history. The text, the transcript of a voice note and the receipt photo are processed on an AI Money server and passed to OpenAI to be interpreted. Your transaction list stays on the phone. If you turn on the WhatsApp accounts option to choose an account from the chat, the bot receives only the name, the alias and the currency of those accounts, never the balances or the last four digits of a card.
English, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. The bot picks the language from your phone number’s country code and answers in that language, for logged transactions as well as for limit notices and delete confirmations.
You do not, and the app never asks for your online banking credentials either. Expenses arrive because you write, dictate or photograph them, or because on Android the app reads the alert SMS your bank sends. The practical consequence is that cash gets recorded too, which is exactly what a bank-linked app cannot see, and that it works with any bank in any country without depending on a list of supported institutions.
Keep reading
- All AI Money features
- WhatsApp expense trackers compared, including building your own
- Best budgeting apps, with verified prices
- Free financial calculators
- WhatsApp Business Platform, official Meta documentation
AI Money
AI expense tracking
Start free, in under a minute
- Free forever
- No card
- Your data stays on your device
