Track bKash and Nagad spending automatically on Android

To see a whole month of bKash and Nagad spending without adding it up yourself, let your phone read each transaction message as it arrives and keep the totals for you. Message Alarm, a free Android app, does this with its spending tracker: it reads bKash, Nagad and Rocket notifications and their SMS, sorts every send money, cash out, recharge and bill, and shows the month in one screen. It never needs your PIN, your login or your balance.

One honest limit before anything else. The app has no SMS permission and does not read your SMS inbox, so it can't go back and count last month. Tracking starts on the day you switch it on.

Where do bKash and Nagad show your history, and why is adding it up hard?

Each wallet keeps its own list of transactions inside its app, and every transaction also sends you a confirmation, usually as an SMS, an app notification or both. Finding one payment is easy. Answering "how much did I spend this month?" is not.

The problem is spread. Many people keep two wallets, plus a bank card, plus the odd Rocket transfer from a relative. Whatever summary one app gives you, it only covers that app. So the real monthly figure, the khoroch hisab your family actually cares about, means scrolling three lists and doing sums on a calculator. It is exactly the kind of job that gets skipped.

The individual transaction list is the part bKash and Nagad already do well. What is missing is the month, across every wallet at once. That is the gap a message-based tracker fills.

How does automatic tracking from bKash, Nagad and Rocket work?

Message Alarm has Notification access, so it sees every confirmation that reaches your notification bar. When the spending tracker is on, it reads the amount, the type of transaction and, where the message names one, the person or shop. Then it adds one line to a list stored on your phone.

It works with the wallet apps (bKash, Nagad, Rocket and Upay among them) and with payment SMS from banks and wallets. A friend's chat message that mentions money is not a bank or wallet message and isn't counted. Amounts are kept in taka (BDT), and if you also have a dollar card, the currency filter lets you look at BDT and USD separately.

Because it reads notifications, the tracker only sees what actually shows up on the phone. If you have turned off notifications for the bKash app and also block its SMS, there is nothing to read. Wallet app notifications need the internet. SMS confirmations arrive without data, which makes them a useful backup.

How are send money, cash out, bill pay and recharge sorted?

Every transaction goes under one type, read from the wording of the message. The types are card purchase, transfer, cash out, bill & recharge, debit and received. Here is where the everyday wallet actions usually end up:

Two things are worth knowing when you read the numbers. First, received means money that came into a wallet, not income. A Cash In of your own notes is money coming in, so it shows as received. Second, cash out is the last thing the tracker sees of that money. Whatever you buy with the cash afterwards leaves no message.

That second point is where we think most monthly budgets leak, and a tracker makes it visible. If cash out is your biggest type month after month, the real spending is happening somewhere the phone can't follow.

Paying a shop through the wallet's payment option is sorted by the same rule: whatever the message says decides the type. If an entry is not a real transaction at all (an offer that happens to mention an amount, say), tap Not a transaction? and it leaves your totals.

Can I see monthly totals and trends?

Yes. The tracker shows spent and received for the period, then splits it by day, by where it went, by what you paid from (bKash, Nagad, a bank card) and by type. Trends compare the period with the previous one, so you can see at a glance that recharge went up or transfers went down. Recent transactions sit underneath for checking.

For a household budget, "paid from" is the view to open first. It tells you which wallet is doing the heavy lifting, which is often a surprise.

What will the tracker miss?

Anything that never sends a message to this phone. The obvious one is cash. Less obvious: money moved from someone else's account. If your brother pays your electricity bill from his bKash, the confirmation goes to his phone, and your tracker never hears about it. The same is true when an agent does a transaction for you from the agent's own account.

Then there is time. Messages from before you turned the tracker on are not counted, because the app does not read the SMS inbox. And if Android closes Message Alarm in the background, payments that arrive while it is stopped are missed too, which is why the battery step in the set-up below matters more than it looks.

None of this makes the numbers useless. It means the tracker shows what went through your own wallets and cards, which is usually the part you can change.

Does it need my bKash PIN, login or balance?

No, none of them. It reads the amount written in each confirmation, the same text you see on your lock screen. It never asks for a PIN, never signs in to a wallet, and doesn't need your balance to work out what you spent. It can't send money, and it doesn't ask for SMS, contacts, location or file permissions.

Your messages are checked on your phone and are never uploaded. The spending list stays on the phone, there are no ads, and you can delete all of it at any time. The app does send a little technical data, like crash reports and anonymous usage events, but never your messages.

How do I set up bKash and Nagad tracking?

1. Install Message Alarm from Google Play on your Android phone and allow Notification access.
2. Open the spending tracker in Message Alarm and turn it on.
3. Make sure bKash, Nagad, Rocket and your SMS app are allowed to show notifications.
4. In Fix background issues, set battery use to Unrestricted, and turn on auto-start if your phone has it.
5. Do a small mobile recharge, then check that it shows under recent transactions.

After the first few transactions, compare the tracker with the wallet's own list once. If they agree, you can stop checking and let it run.

What else can these messages do?

The same confirmations power a few other free features. Shopkeepers can have every incoming bKash or Nagad payment spoken aloud like a soundbox. Card and biller messages can remind you before a bill is due. For a wider look at how message-based tracking works with any bank, read the guide to expense tracking from bank messages. It works the same way with UPI apps in India.

Is it free? Yes. Message Alarm is a free Android app that rings a loud alarm, even when your phone is on silent, when an important message arrives from a person or with a word you choose. The spending tracker costs nothing and has no limit, like bill reminders, Smart Tray, Quiet mode, saved and deleted messages, history and the smart features. The free plan only caps alarms: 2 watched apps, 3 app alarms a day and 15 a week, and 2 auto-replies a week. There are no ads.