The Problem with Uncategorized Spending
Open your bank statement and scroll through the transactions. You'll see entries like UPI/ZOMATOICICI/Food, UPI/9876543210@PAYTM/Transfer, UPI/FASTAG@HDFCBANK/Toll. The raw data is there — but it takes significant effort to manually group hundreds of transactions into meaningful categories.
UPI Audit solves this automatically. Every transaction is placed into one of 9 spending categories based on the merchant name, VPA (UPI ID), and transaction description. Here's what each category covers and why it matters.
1. Food Delivery
This category captures all payments made to food delivery platforms and cloud kitchens. Common merchants include:
- Zomato — India's largest food delivery platform
- Swiggy — the second-largest, also includes Instamart grocery deliveries
- Magicpin — restaurant discovery and delivery
- EatSure (Rebel Foods) — cloud kitchen brands like Faasos, Behrouz Biryani, Oven Story
Food delivery is often one of the top 2 spending categories for urban Indians. The average Indian urban household spends ₹1,500–₹3,000 per month on food delivery apps. Seeing this number clearly is often the first step toward cooking more at home.
2. Groceries
Online grocery payments go here — both quick commerce and scheduled delivery:
- Blinkit (formerly Grofers) — 10-minute grocery delivery
- Zepto — quick commerce grocery
- BigBasket — scheduled grocery delivery
- JioMart — Reliance's grocery platform
- DMart Ready — DMart's online store
Note: payments at a physical grocery store made via UPI usually land in the Local Shops & Retail category (when you scan the store's QR code) rather than here, because the store's UPI ID isn't a recognised grocery-brand VPA.
3. Shopping
E-commerce and retail purchases fall here:
- Amazon, Flipkart — major e-commerce platforms
- Myntra, AJIO, Nykaa — fashion and beauty
- Meesho — social commerce
- Tata CLiQ — premium retail
Payments through Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU, or CCAvenue payment gateways also default to Shopping since these gateways are typically used by e-commerce businesses.
4. Local Shops & Retail
This is the category that makes UPI Audit genuinely useful for India. A huge share of everyday UPI spending goes to kirana stores, street vendors, autos, chai stalls, and small retailers who accept payment through a QR code rather than a branded app. These appear in your statement with opaque VPAs like paytmqr2810…@paytm or bharatpe.90xxx@axl — no brand name, just a merchant QR string.
UPI Audit detects these QR-merchant signatures and groups them into Local Shops & Retail instead of mislabelling them as wallet transfers or dumping them into Others. For many users this is one of the largest categories — and separating it out finally answers the question "where did all those small daily payments actually go?" Because the merchant name is only a QR code, this category shows the raw VPA for each payment so you can recognise your regular shops.
5. Transport
Mobility and travel payments are grouped here:
- Uber, Ola, Rapido, Namma Yatri — ride-hailing
- IRCTC — train tickets
- redBus, MakeMyTrip, Goibibo — bus and travel booking
- FASTag — highway toll payments (detected from VPA domain or description)
- Fuel payments — petrol pumps often appear in descriptions as "petrol", "IOCL", "HP", or "Bharat Petroleum"
FASTag payments are particularly interesting — they appear as cryptic bank entries but are correctly identified as Transport since the VPA domain contains "fastag" or "netc".
6. Subscriptions
Recurring digital service payments:
- Netflix, Hotstar (Disney+), Zee5, JioCinema — OTT streaming
- Spotify — music streaming
- Amazon Prime — e-commerce + streaming membership
- YouTube Premium, Apple — tech subscriptions
- Claude, OpenAI — AI service subscriptions
Subscriptions are easy to forget about — many Indians have 5–8 active subscriptions running simultaneously. Seeing the total monthly cost in one place is often eye-opening.
7. Recharges & Bills
Utility and telecom payments:
- Jio, Airtel, Vi (Vodafone Idea), BSNL — mobile recharges and postpaid bills
- Electricity boards — BESCOM (Bangalore), MSEDCL (Maharashtra), TNEB (Tamil Nadu), CESC (Kolkata), and others detected from description patterns
- Gas and water bills — Indraprastha Gas, Mahanagar Gas, piped gas connections
This is often the most predictable category — bills tend to be the same amount month after month, making anomalies easy to spot.
8. Transfers & Wallets
Person-to-person transfers and financial transactions:
- Payments to phone numbers — if you paid someone using their 10-digit mobile number as UPI ID (e.g.,
9876543210@paytm), it's classified as a P2P transfer - EMI payments — loan repayments detected from description keywords like "EMI", "loan repay"
- SIP/mutual funds — Zerodha, Groww, Kuvera, Coin, Smallcase investments
- Rent and maintenance — housing society fees, rent payments to individuals
- Insurance premiums — LIC and other insurance payments
This category often has the highest total amount since it includes rent and loan EMIs — large fixed expenses that shouldn't be confused with discretionary spending.
9. Others
Transactions that don't match any known merchant, QR-merchant signature, or pattern stay in Others. Now that Local Shops & Retail catches most QR-code merchants, Others is reserved for genuinely unidentifiable payments — a one-off transfer to an unrecognised VPA, or a service that doesn't expose any usable identifier.
Rather than hiding these, UPI Audit shows you the raw transaction details — date, VPA, description, and amount — so you can identify them yourself. This transparency is important: a genuinely unidentifiable transaction is still your money, and you deserve to see it.
How to Get the Most Accurate Breakdown
The categorization is only as good as the data in your bank statement. For the most accurate results: upload a statement covering at least 3 months, ensure it's a native digital PDF (not a scan), and check the Others section for any large transactions you'd like to reclassify in your own records.