How Unyfy works

An automatic expense tracker does the same seven things in the same order, whoever builds it. It connects to the channels where your bank reports activity, filters out messages that record no money moving, removes debits reported more than once, names the merchant behind each payment, finds the charges that repeat, predicts the month ahead from those repeats, and only then checks your financial products against what it has seen. Each stage depends on the one before: a duplicate missed at stage three becomes a phantom subscription at stage five.

The illustrative month below belongs to a salaried person on Android with one savings account and one credit card, both reporting by SMS and email, and three earlier months of bank statements uploaded as PDFs.

There are three ways in, and they are not equal. Email is the channel that works everywhere: banks and card issuers send transaction alerts to the address registered with them, and the app reads those bank and card transaction emails. SMS is the fuller channel for UPI, because nearly every bank sends an SMS for every UPI debit, and the Android app reads it. On iPhone, use the web app at app.unyfy.co.in, which reads your bank's email alerts and statements. Statement PDFs are the optional third way in. They add history and catch debits that never produced an alert. Bank statements from Axis, HDFC, ICICI, Kotak and Federal Bank are parsed.

The Android SMS permission is not selective by design: once granted, it covers the whole inbox, OTPs and personal messages included. A transaction reader's job is to take only messages that record money moving and let the rest pass. In the illustrative month, 14 of the 140 messages from bank senders were set aside even though they came from real bank headers: 3 payment-due notices, 4 statement-ready emails, 5 loan or card offers written to look like alerts, and 2 balance or limit updates. That is 10.0 percent of what arrived.

None of this needs a credential. Reading an alert your bank has already sent you requires no bank password, no net banking login and no UPI PIN, and the app holds none of them. It cannot move money on its own. A gold purchase in the app is a payment you authorise yourself.

Of the 126 money-movement alerts, 23 described a debit already counted. 21 were the same card or mandate debit reported once by SMS and once by email, and 2 were SMS resends. That is 18.25 percent of the money-movement alerts. Removing them matters more in rupees than in count, because the debits banks report on both channels tend to be the large ones: card purchases, EMIs and SIPs. Kept in, the 23 duplicates would have added ₹39,390 to a month in which ₹72,480 really left, showing ₹1,11,870 of spending across 117 debits. That is a 54.35 percent overstatement, from one missing step.

The matching rule is strict. When both alerts carry the same reference number, they are one debit. When one channel has no reference, the app compares the amount, the last digits of the account or card, the counterparty and a narrow time window, and drops a debit already seen through the other channel. The strictness cuts both ways: two debits of the same amount to the same merchant with two different reference numbers are two charges, and both stay in the ledger. That is how a genuine double charge survives deduplication instead of being quietly merged away.

Naming comes next. A UPI debit arrives with a handle, not a name, and a card alert often arrives with a descriptor cut short. The app matches handles against a merchant database of about 10,000 entries that maps UPI handles to merchant names, so a string of letters and a bank suffix becomes a named shop and a category. In this month, 41 of the 62 UPI debits went to businesses and 21 to people: friends, a landlord, a domestic worker. Transfers to people should not be forced into a merchant category.

Recurring detection works at the merchant level, after naming. The app groups debits by merchant, looks at amount and interval, and separates three kinds of repeat. Mandates are standing instructions, UPI AutoPay or NACH, that debit without you approving each payment; their alerts usually identify them as mandate or NACH debits, and they keep charging until cancelled at the source. Subscriptions are services billed on a cycle, on a mandate or a card. Scheduled transfers to people, such as rent on the 1st, repeat without being a subscription at all. In the illustrative month, 11 recurring charges were found.

Prediction is the recurring list pointed forward. The eleven charges above are committed: they will leave next month whether or not you spend anything else. Against a take-home salary of ₹92,000, the usual committed month of ₹38,990 is 42.38 percent, leaving ₹53,010 for everything else.

Next month is not usual. The uploaded statements show a ₹13,200 annual term insurance premium debited in the same month last year. Added to the eleven, next month's committed total is ₹52,190, which is 56.73 percent of the salary, and what is left drops to ₹39,810. A tracker that averaged the premium would call it ₹1,100 a month and show nothing unusual about next month at all. The average is right over a year and wrong in the one month that matters.

On Pro, the Fixed Expenses screen shows this forecast for what the ledger sees repeating, the EMIs, SIPs, rent, bills, subscriptions and card bill, with what is paid and what is left so far this month. It is a number to look at before the month starts.

The loan check starts with your credit report. The app pulls your Equifax report as a soft enquiry, which does not affect your credit score, and shows you the score and the accounts behind it, including any overdue, settled or written-off accounts, before any lender sees an application. Offers then come from 15+ banks and NBFCs. Only the one lender you choose to apply with runs a hard enquiry. Credit bureaus in India generally record hard enquiries made for credit applications, and several in a short span can weigh on a score, which is why the order matters.

The test itself is not whether a lower rate exists. It is whether switching still pays after the fees. Take a ₹3 lakh personal loan over 36 months at an illustrative 18 percent, with an EMI of ₹10,846, and an illustrative new offer at 12.5 percent with a 2 percent processing fee plus 18 percent GST. Assume the old loan is fixed-rate and charges an illustrative 2 percent plus GST to foreclose; check your own loan agreement, because that charge decides many of these.

Card discovery uses the categorised ledger rather than a questionnaire. The app compares your actual category spending against a database of 605 Indian credit cards from 32 issuers, and it is income-gated: a card whose eligibility sits above your income is not shown, because a card you cannot get is not an answer. In the illustrative month, ₹28,200 went through the card in four categories: ₹9,500 online shopping, ₹11,000 groceries, ₹4,200 food delivery and ₹3,500 fuel. On a card paying an illustrative flat 1 percent, that earns ₹3,384 a year. A card paying an illustrative 5 percent on online shopping and 1 percent elsewhere earns ₹7,944, and after its ₹1,000 fee, ₹1,180 with GST, the gain is ₹3,380 a year. Reward caps, exclusions and fee waivers change that number card by card.

Vouchers are discounted merchant vouchers bought in the app for brands you already use. The discount is typically around 7.5 percent and varies by brand. On ₹6,000 a month at one grocery brand, 7.5 percent is ₹450 a month, ₹5,400 a year. It pays only on spending that would happen anyway.

Gold is digital gold, 24K at 99.9 percent purity, bought, sold or saved through an SIP via SafeGold. Each purchase is a payment you authorise in the app.

Two capabilities do the work described on this page. The first is the ledger itself: bank and card transaction emails, transactional SMS on Android, and statement PDFs from Axis, HDFC, ICICI, Kotak and Federal Bank, read without manual entry, with a debit seen on both SMS and email counted once and UPI handles turned into merchant names. The second is the forward view. On Pro, the Fixed Expenses screen predicts next month's committed outflows, the EMIs, SIPs, rent, bills, subscriptions and card bill, with what is paid and what is left so far this month. Its Subscriptions list shows each recurring subscription with its amount and whether it is due or paid, and each one's detail shows how often it is paid, the usual payment days, how many past payments matched and the past months' payments. From the same ledger, a loan priced above what you would be offered today is flagged with the switching arithmetic after fees.

It never asks for your bank password or UPI PIN, and every payment is one you authorise. Install Unyfy on Android, or use the web app at app.unyfy.co.in on an iPhone.