Recorded live from a really expensive cruise, for some reason money and our relationship to it as writers is on my mind. Here’s a quick account of quickly accounting for all my spending on board – and a Shortcut you can use to keep on top of any spending.

LINKS:
John Dorney’s fundraiser: https://fundraise.cancerresearchuk.org/page/big-finishers-for-the-love-of-running
My Holiday Spending Shortcut: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/caf2495be7594adf8a0a4e8f5619cfa2

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SCRIPT:

– Hello, I’m William Gallagher and this is 58keys which, as ever, is for writers like you and me who use and who write on Macs, iPhones and iPads. This time I want to touch on the business of writing, on doing this money, and specifically on how – I may be projecting here – writers and money don’t seem to go together very well. We don’t have a lot and yet we’re also bad with what we do have.
– Or I am.
– Or I have been.
– But these Macs and iPhones and iPads that we write on can help us. Possibly they could help us most by being cheaper, but the first step to fiscal responsibility is recognising there’s a problem – and writing a Shortcut to help with it.
– Follow.
– I’m on holiday as I record this, and a friend has launched a charity fundraiser that I want to support.
– Once I’ve done that, once I’ve paid over some cash, look what I get to do next.
– Swipe to the side to bring up the Today page, tap on Holiday Spending.
– Enter the amount
– Say what it’s for.
– Choose a currency. As I say, I’m on holiday, I need a few currencies.
– And I’m done.
– Nothing to see here.
– Unless I open the Numbers spreadsheet – on any of my devices – and choose my Holiday Spending spreadsheet.
– There it is, there’s the donation to writer John Dorney’s fundraiser.
– It’s recorded, it’s recorded at the moment I spend the money, just about, it’s recorded so fast that there’s never a need to put it off until later, it is recorded immediately into the spreadsheet.
– When I get home, I’ll sort that spreadsheet by currency types, look up conversions or whatever, and know how much I’m out.
– And I’m also going to change that Shortcut from Holiday Spending to General Spending – and keep on using it.
– So that’s a Shortcut that I run from a widget in the Today screen, which asks me a couple of questions, and which appends the answers to a specific spreadsheet.
– If that’s enough for you to do it too, and you think it could be useful, knock yourself out. If you want to see the steps it took, let’s get a biscuit.
– STING
– I run this exclusively on my iPhone because it’s the one device that is always with me, and that swipe to the Today view is so fast. Let me show you the Shortcut on my iPad, though, as a) it’s a bigger screen and 2) I’m filming this with that iPhone.
– First up, open Shortcuts on iPad, iPhone or Mac, click the plus to create a new Shortcur. For each step now, you’ll search the panel at the side until it shows what you want, then you can drag it over to the main part of the screen where you’re building your Shortcut. And the first thing you want is for the Shortcut to record what the date is.
– But Shortcuts by default record a lot of information when you ask for the date. Day, Month, Year, yes, but also hours minutes, seconds. Since you want a simple date, use Format Date, and choose Short. Maybe you want the time recorded too, but I don’t care about that for this, so I turned Time Format to None.
– I’m going to need this short date later, so I save it. I save the short date as a variable, which I’ve imaginatively called DateVar. Look, I have enough trouble coming up with good titles, simple works.
– Next, I want the Shortcut to ask me how much money I’ve just spent – and that figure is saved into another variable, AmountVar. Notice that I’m asking only for a number – if I tried to type letters into this bit, nothing would happen.
– Last question, which currency? At the start of the holiday I had this as a text box and just typed a currency symbol in. But on UK iPhones, the US dollar symbols is few taps away, so I added this list to choose from.
– That chosen currency gets saved in another variable, CurrencyVar
– And then the only bit that is fiddly, I think. What this last section does is take the Date from DateVar, the Amount, saved in AmountVar, then what I’ve bought in WhatVar, and lastly CurrencyVar, and sends them all off to Numbers.
– One fiddly bit is getting it to send each of those in one go. You have to choose Shortcuts’ Add to Numbers action, tap to enter the first one, then look for the plus sign that appears, and tap that to add the next.
– But then more fiddly was this “bottom of Table 1 in Holiday Spending in Holiday Spending.”
– Like Excel, Numbers has a spreadsheet document that has a name. Also like Excel, it can have tabs within that document, each of which have their own name.
– Unlike Excel, Numbers doesn’t use the whole screen for the actual spreadsheet, the thing with figures in. Instead, Numbers has what it calls Tables and you can have any number of separate tables on a spreadsheet.
– So “bottom of Table 1 in Holiday Spending in Holiday Spending” really means adding a row to the end of the table I’ve created. And that table is in a tab sheet called Holiday Spending. And that tab is in a spreadsheet document called Holiday Spending.
– Get the names of the document, the tab sheet and the table, and you’re sorted.
– Except.
– After running this a couple of times, I got irritated at always getting that Numbers spreadsheet on my screen when I’d pick up the iPhone. I’d like a way to clos the Numbers sheet, but you can’t do that on an iPhone,
– So I found this as the best equivalent. Go to Home Screen.
– When I run this, it asks me the questions, it appends everything to the spreadsheet, and then it leaves the Numbers spreadsheet and goes back to where I was.
– STING
– You do have to set up the spreadsheet before you do all this. And I’m sure you could do much fancier spreadsheets, maybe with categories for what you bought or what currency you bought it in, maybe it auto-sorts by currency and shows you running totals.
– But my little Shortcut is simple and it is fast to use, so I use it. And at any time I can open the spreadsheet to see what my latest spending is.
– That’s all I need.
– Have a look at my Shortcut, see what you can do to make it yours. I’ve added a link to download it in the description.
– But for now, that’s it for this edition of 58keys. And as I go off to my account to ask if there’s any way to make a cruise tax deductible, you take care of yourself, okay? Write more, too. And I’ll see you soon.