If you've ever tried to answer "how much do I actually spend at that one coffee shop?", you've run into the gap between what budgeting apps record and what you want to know. Almost all of them capture the category. Far fewer capture the merchant. And the ones that do capture it usually get it in a way you might not want.
The two ways apps get a merchant name
From your bank. Bank-linked apps — Monarch Money, Copilot, Simplifi, and Mint before it shut down — read the merchant string straight off the transaction feed. It's automatic and you never type anything. The cost is the thing that makes it possible: a connection to your bank account, held by a third-party aggregator, with the merchant history that comes with it. It's also imperfect in a specific way anyone who has used these apps knows — the raw feed gives you SQ *BLUE BOTTLE 0412 and TST* BLUE BOTTLE and you spend your evenings teaching the app they're the same place.
From you. YNAB built the payee in as a first-class concept from the start; it's central to how the app models a transaction, and it works whether you link a bank or enter manually. Most simple manual trackers went the other way and gave you a free-text note instead — which technically holds a merchant name, but a note isn't a field. You can't group by it, you can't rank by it, and "Starbucks", "starbucks" and "sbux" are three different strings.
Why a note isn't the same as a field
This is the distinction that matters, and it's easy to miss when comparing feature lists — plenty of apps will tell you that you can "record the merchant", meaning you can type it into a note.
A note is a string attached to one transaction. A payee is a record that many transactions point at. That difference is what lets an app rank your spending by merchant, autocomplete a name you've used before, and fix a year of inconsistent typing in one operation instead of editing forty rows. Without it, the merchant information is technically present and practically unusable — you can search for a name, but you can't ask "who did I pay most this month?" and get an answer.
Where Pocket Clear sits
Pocket Clear now has a proper Payee field — a real record, not a note — while still never asking for a bank connection. You type the name; autocomplete means you type it once and pick it thereafter. It gives you:
- Autocomplete from your own history, so the same shop stays one payee rather than five spellings.
- Search by payee name across your whole history, alongside note, category and amount.
- A Top Payees report — spending ranked by who you paid, not just what you bought.
- Rename and merge, for cleaning up the drift that accumulates over a year of typing.
- Safe deletes — removing a payee takes it out of the picker but leaves the name on your past transactions.
The trade is explicit: you type the merchant, and in exchange nothing needs access to your bank. If automatic merchant capture matters more to you than that, a bank-linked app is genuinely the better tool and we'd rather say so.
An honest comparison
Roughly where the main options land on this one feature:
- Bank-linked apps (Monarch, Copilot, Simplifi) — automatic merchant capture, at the cost of bank access, plus some ongoing cleanup of messy feed strings.
- YNAB — a first-class payee, well integrated, though it comes attached to a zero-based budgeting methodology you have to adopt to get value from the rest of the app.
- Simple manual trackers (Monefy, Cashew and similar) — usually a note field only, so merchant data isn't groupable.
- Pocket Clear — a structured payee with autocomplete, search, ranking and merging, entered manually, with no bank connection at any point.
If your priority is never linking a bank and knowing who you paid, that combination is unusually rare, which is most of why we built it.
Worth knowing before you switch
In Pocket Clear, payees are opt-in and off by default — turn them on in Settings › Payees. They're a Pro feature. And in Partner Mode the Top Payees report deliberately shows only your own spending, because payees aren't shared between partners and merging two people's lists by name would be a guess.
Details: how Payees work.