Capture: Log a Bank Message in One Tap — Read on Your Phone, Never Uploaded

Manual entry works because writing the amount down is what makes you notice you spent it. Capture removes the typing — not the noticing, because the noticing never lived in the keystrokes.

The two-tap problem

Pocket Clear has always been built around entering a transaction quickly — two taps, amount and category, done. That is fast when you already know what you spent, but a lot of spending doesn't arrive that way. It arrives as a bank text: "Rs 450 debited at STARBUCKS COFFEE". A card alert. An order confirmation email. A receipt still in your hand.

In every one of those cases, the amount and the merchant already exist in something you're holding. Manual entry asks you to read that, then type it back into a different app, in a different format, from scratch. It isn't the two taps that wear people down — it's the retyping of information a bank or a shop already sent you.

Before: read the text, open Pocket Clear, tap Add Transaction, type the amount, pick a category, save. After: tap Share on the text, choose Pocket Clear, and it's logged.

What Capture does

Capture is off until you turn it on. It sits on the On-Device AI tab behind one switch, it's marked Beta, and none of the doors below exist until you flip it.

Once it's on, Capture is one feature with several doors into it. On both platforms: tap Share in Messages, Mail or Photos and choose Pocket Clear, or use the Quick Log button on Home, which takes a paste, a typed sentence, a scan or a photo. On iPhone only: say "Log an expense in Pocket Clear" to Siri and speak the amount and merchant, or reach the same thing from Shortcuts, Control Center and the Visual Intelligence result row. Android has no voice entry point.

Whichever door you use, one of two things happens. When Capture is confident it has read something correctly — a clean bank SMS, a clear receipt — it saves the expense immediately and shows a 5-second Undo, so a wrong read is one tap to reverse. When it isn't sure — an unfamiliar format, a smudged photo, an ambiguous amount — it stops on a confirm card instead of guessing, and nothing is saved until you approve it. If something looks like a transaction you've already logged, it's flagged as a possible duplicate rather than saved twice.

Why on-device

Every capture is read on the phone it was shared to. On an iPhone 15 Pro or later with Apple Intelligence on, that's Apple's on-device Foundation Models. On a Pixel 9, a Galaxy S25, or another phone with Gemini Nano, that's Google's on-device model. Everywhere else, a rules parser built into Pocket Clear reads bank messages and card alerts without any model at all.

This is a privacy decision first: the text of your bank message and the photo of your receipt are not the kind of thing that should travel to a server just to be read once. Keeping the read on the device means there is nothing sent to Pocket Clear and nothing sent to any AI provider to leak, subpoena, or retrain on — only the expense you actually confirm ever reaches a server, and only if you have cloud sync turned on.

It's also an economic decision, and we'd rather say so than pretend it isn't. Reading every share through a cloud AI model means a bill that scales with how often people use the feature, which is exactly the wrong incentive for a feature meant to be used constantly. On-device inference has no such meter running — which is part of why Capture can be free for everyone in the first place.

How it picks a category

Capture decides a category in a fixed order. First, your own history — if you've filed a merchant before, it uses that category again. Second, a built-in list of well-known merchants, for names it recognises even if you haven't logged them yourself. Third, the on-device model, on phones that have one. Whatever it lands on, it's a suggestion, not a lock — you can change the category on any captured transaction exactly as you would on one you typed yourself.

What it doesn't do

Some of what Capture leaves out is as important as what it does:

• No bank linking. Capture reads a message or a photo you hand it. It does not connect to an account, and it never asks for banking credentials.
• No background reading. Pocket Clear does not scan your messages or your photo library on its own. Capture only ever sees what you explicitly share or paste.
• No auto-save when unsure. An uncertain read stops on a confirm card. It never guesses its way to a saved transaction.
• No cloud AI. Nothing shared into Capture is sent to Pocket Clear's servers or to any AI provider for processing — the model runs on the phone, or it doesn't run at all and the rules parser handles it instead.

Opt-in, Beta, free until 31 December 2026

Capture ships as an opt-in Beta. It's off by default, you turn it on from the On-Device AI tab, and you turn it off again from the same switch — nothing about it runs until you do.

It's a Pro feature, and it's free for everyone until 31 December 2026. After that date it becomes part of Pro, and anything already captured stays exactly as it is. That's true whether you're one of the 40,000+ people already using Pocket Clear or installing it for the first time this week.

The full walkthrough, including how to pin Capture in your share sheet and set up the Siri phrase, is in the help centre: Capture.