How to track your Paytm spending, including what never reaches your bank's texts

The short answer

Paytm's Spend Analytics shows your Paytm UPI spending by category, month on month, and you can download UPI statements as Excel or PDF. That covers Paytm. For the whole month, add a tracker that reads Paytm's payment notifications and your bank's texts, so card swipes, bank debits and other UPI apps sit in the same list.

What Paytm already gives you

Paytm does more for tracking than most UPI apps. Its Play listing names four features that help:

• Spend Analytics: categorised spend insights with month-on-month tracking.
• UPI statements in Excel and PDF: useful for a monthly review or for tax filing.
• Total UPI bank balance: balances across your linked accounts in one view.
• Hide and unhide payments: you control which payments show in your history.

All four work on what went through Paytm. Card swipes, payments from PhonePe, Google Pay or CRED, EMIs and rent by NEFT stay outside it, unless Paytm made them.

UPI Lite: the payments your bank doesn't text you about

UPI Lite pays small amounts from a balance you top up in advance, without a PIN. Your passbook shows the top-up, not each payment, and banks usually send one SMS a day summing up that day's UPI Lite payments. So a ₹40 chai paid by UPI Lite gets no debit SMS of its own. Paytm's notification is the only message about that payment as it happens.

Paytm's listing calls this "clutter-free bank statements", and for a statement that's true. For tracking, it means a tracker that reads only bank SMS sees a ₹500 top-up and a daily summary, not the twelve small payments with their shops. Paytm says its UPI Lite allows PIN-less payments up to ₹4,000 a day, which is a lot of small spending to lose sight of.

How to track Paytm with everything else

1. 1

   Install PennyWise AI on Android

   It reads payment notifications from Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay, BHIM, CRED and Amazon Pay, plus your bank's texts. Free to start.

2. 2

   Allow notification access

   This is what catches UPI Lite payments, because Paytm's own notification is the only alert for them.

3. 3

   Allow SMS too, if you like

   Bank texts cover card swipes, bank debits and payments from apps you don't use often.

4. 4

   Pay as usual

   A Paytm payment logs itself with the amount and merchant, and a notification offers Undo if anything looks wrong.

When Paytm's notification and your bank's SMS both describe the same payment, PennyWise AI keeps one entry. It matches them by the UPI reference number when the message has one, and by a close match on the payment otherwise.

See Paytm, card and bank spending together