Every expense you log answers what you spent money on. Groceries, transport, subscriptions. What most trackers never capture is who you spent it with — and that turns out to be the question people actually ask themselves when they're trying to work out where the money went.
"I spend too much on food" isn't actionable. "I spent more at one coffee shop last month than on my phone bill" is. Same transactions, different axis.
Pocket Clear now has a proper Payee field.
- A real field, not a note. Payee sits alongside amount and category on Add and Edit Transaction, with autocomplete from your own history — start typing "Sta" and Starbucks comes up.
- Searchable. Search your whole history by payee name, alongside note, category and amount.
- Top Payees in Reports. Your spending ranked by who you paid, so the pattern is visible rather than something you have to reconstruct.
- Rename and merge. If "Starbucks", "starbucks" and "Sbux" have crept in over a year, merge them into one and every transaction follows.
- Deleting is safe. Removing a payee takes it out of the picker; your past transactions keep the name and still show up in search and reports. Nothing is rewritten.
Why it's opt-in
Payees are off by default. Turn them on in Settings › Payees and the field appears; leave them off and the Add Transaction screen is exactly as it was.
That's deliberate. A payee field is genuinely useful if you want a second axis of analysis, and pure friction if you don't — one more thing to fill in on a screen whose whole point is taking five seconds. Plenty of people track spending perfectly well with category alone, and making them tap past an empty field forever to serve the people who want it would be the wrong trade. So it's there when you ask for it.
It's a Pro feature, like Tags, and it follows the same pattern: opt-in, off by default, invisible until you want it.
Merging, and why it matters more than it sounds
Autocomplete stops most duplicates before they start, but a year of typing produces drift anyway — a name entered on a phone with autocorrect on, a shorthand you used for a month, a trailing space. You end up with three payees that are obviously the same merchant to you and three separate rows to the app, splitting one spending pattern into pieces small enough to look unimportant.
Manage Payees lets you select several and merge them into one. Every transaction pointing at the merged-away names is repointed, and the count is shown before you confirm so you know exactly how much is moving. It's one operation, and it either completes or doesn't — there's no state where half your transactions moved.
One honest limitation for couples
Top Payees shows your own spending, even when you're viewing combined totals in Partner Mode. That's a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.
Payees aren't shared between partners — you each build your own list, and the same shop typed on two phones is two separate records with no reliable way to know they're the same. Merging them by name would be a guess, and a wrong guess would silently combine two people's spending under one label. So the report stays honest about whose data it is, and says so on screen.
Getting started
Settings › Payees to turn it on. From there the field appears on Add Transaction, and Manage Payees becomes available for renaming, merging and tidying up as your list grows. Nothing changes about transactions you've already logged.
Full details: how Payees work.
And search came back
Alongside payees, search returned to All Transactions — and reached iOS for the first time. Search your whole history by note, category, amount or payee name.
It sits inside the collapsible filter block rather than pinned above the list, which is deliberate: an always-visible search bar plus the filter row pushed the actual transactions off the top of the screen on smaller phones, which is why the previous version was removed. Free on both platforms.