Help

Finding your way around

The four tabs and the button between them

• Home — the year so far, what is due next, and the card worth using right now. The header carries the theme switch, Settings, Activity (every transaction, searchable and filterable) and Import statement.
• Cards — one face per card, with its cycle, outstanding, limit used and reward rules. Add, edit, archive and restore cards here.
• Rewards — points by card and programme, what is about to expire, and the way through to Redemptions.
• Analysis — the six lenses, with a financial-year stepper at the top and a table view behind every chart.
• The + button — log a transaction, or add a card.

Getting started

The same ground, walked one step at a time with a picture of each step happening, is on the How to use page — the better place to start if you have just installed the app.

1. Read the four chapters, or skip them

   The introduction on first run asks for nothing and can be left from the first frame. To read it again later: Settings → Read the introduction again.

2. Add your first card

   Go to Cards → Add a card. Give it a name, the last four digits, the network and issuer, the credit limit, the statement close day and the payment due day. The close and due days are what drive the cycle view, the outstanding figure and the reminders, so they are worth getting right off a statement rather than from memory.

3. Describe how the card earns

   Open the card, tap Edit, and open the rule editor. Set the base rate, then add accelerators for the categories the card pays extra on, any monthly cap on those accelerators, and any milestone thresholds — a milestone's bonus joins your points on the day your spend reaches it. A welcome bonus or a promotion the rules cannot describe goes in under Rewards → Milestones and bonuses. If the card charges an annual fee, enter it with its waiver condition — Cracker will forecast whether you are on track to clear it and what per day it now takes.

4. Put some spend in

   Either log transactions by hand with the + button — the reward is worked out as you type — or import a statement PDF, which is far faster for a full month.

5. Log a redemption when you make one

   This is the step most trackers skip and the one that makes the numbers honest. Points spent, rupees returned, fees and taxes paid. From then on the app values your balance at what your redemptions actually returned.

Importing a statement

Before you start

Fill in Settings → Your details — name, date of birth, and card digits if your bank's password uses them. These are what the app builds statement passwords from. They are stored in Keystore-backed secure storage, are never shown back to you in full, and never leave the phone. Without them, a locked statement stays locked and you will have to type the password yourself.

1. Pick the PDF

   Home → Import statement, or Cards → Import a statement. Choose the file your bank emailed you — or up to 20 at once, a year of one card or a month of all of them. Each file is hashed first: if that exact statement has been imported before, the app refuses rather than silently doubling every row.

2. It unlocks the file

   The app tries, in order: the rule that worked for this bank last time, then passwords derived from your details and the card digits, then a password you type. A password you type is tried on every other locked file you picked too, and forgotten when you leave the screen. The password itself is never stored — only which rule opened the file.

3. It reads and reconciles

   The text is extracted with its coordinates and rebuilt into columns, the issuer is detected from the content (you can override it), and the parsed rows are checked against the totals the bank printed on the statement. Where the statement prints what a transaction earned, that figure is used as-is and the reward engine is not consulted at all.

4. You review before anything is saved

   Every row arrives staged, with a category and a confidence, and duplicates flagged rather than merged. Fix a category, clear a flag, drop a row. Nothing touches the ledger until you commit. With several files, each gets one line and its verdict: the ones that balance and match a card can be added together, oldest first, each checked against what the one before it added; any other opens into the same review a single file gets.

5. Undo is whole-statement

   If a commit turns out wrong, remove that statement and every row it brought with it in one action.

Reading the numbers

Realized value per point

Blended from your own redemptions, weighted by points, after booking fees and taxes. It appears once you have logged at least one redemption for that programme. Until then the app will not put a rupee value on a balance it has no evidence for.

Expiry runway

Points retire oldest-first, so the runway is the date the oldest surviving lot lapses. Points that have already lapsed are shown as a loss, not folded into the balance.

Money left on the table

What you earned against what the best card you already own would have paid on the same spend. It is not a comparison against cards you do not have.

Limit used

Measured against the last statement close, because that is the balance a credit bureau actually sees — not financial-year-to-date spend, which would climb all year.

Interest-free run

In the Cycles lens: how long a purchase made today would go before it must be paid. Putting a large spend on the card that just closed its cycle is worth weeks of float, which no reward rate competes with.

Reminders

Payment due reminders

Settings → Reminders. Off by default. Choose how many days before the due date the first reminder lands and whether a second one follows. Android will ask for notification permission at the moment you switch this on, never at launch.

Reminders are scheduled, fired and cancelled entirely on the phone — a local notification needs no network. They are deliberately not exact alarms: a reminder that arrives within an hour of its slot is doing its job. If reminders stop arriving after a reboot or a battery-optimisation change, open the app once and switch them off and on again to reschedule.

Protecting it

Two locks, both optional, both off by default

App lock

Settings → App lock puts your fingerprint in front of the whole app. This is the one that matters if someone is holding your phone already unlocked — without it, they can read every transaction, card and limit in here.

Identity seal

Settings → Seal these details encrypts your date of birth and card digits under a separate key that the hardware will not release without a fingerprint. The prompt then appears only where those details are genuinely needed: opening the details screen, or deriving a statement password.

Enrolling a new fingerprint on the phone destroys that key and the sealed details with it. That is intended, not a bug — someone who adds their own finger to a found phone must not inherit access. You would re-enter the details once and seal them again.

Backups, exports and erasure

Backup and restore — the copy you can put back

Settings → Backup and restore writes one encrypted file, openable only with a passphrase you choose, to a location you pick. It is the only route back from a lost or reset phone. Restore reads that file into a fresh install.

Restore checks the file before anything on the phone changes, and says which it is if it cannot go ahead: a wrong passphrase, a damaged file, or a file that is not a Cracker backup. While it runs it shows how long is left — keep the app open until it finishes.

Nobody else holds this file and nobody can reset its passphrase. Store both somewhere you will still have them when the phone is gone.

Export a copy — the copy you can read

Settings → Export a copy writes every transaction as a CSV for a spreadsheet. It is deliberately not a backup: it is unencrypted and cannot be restored. Once that file is out of the app it is an ordinary file on your device, subject to whatever else can read it — including anything you share it with.

Erase everything

Settings → Erase everything. The database key is destroyed, not just the rows: deleted rows linger in free pages until something overwrites them, while a destroyed key makes the whole file unreadable at once, to a forensic tool as much as to this app. The database files, the write-ahead log, the identity vault and the biometric seal all go with it. You confirm by typing the word — it is the one action in the app with no undo, and no copy of your data exists anywhere else.

Housekeeping

• Categories — rename, recolour, add your own. Category drives the reward rules and the waiver forecast, so it is worth having the right ones.
• People — cards can belong to different people in the same household. It is a grouping inside this install; there is no login and no server behind it.
• Archived cards — a closed card keeps its history, stops cluttering the tabs, and can be brought back.
• Theme — light, dark, or whatever the phone is doing.

When something does not work

“Could not open the database”

The app could not get its key back from the Android Keystore. This can follow a device restore from another phone, or a system-level change to the secure hardware. The app stops rather than quietly writing your data unencrypted. If it persists, the route forward is a fresh install and a restore from your backup file.

The statement will not open

Check that Settings → Your details exactly matches what the bank holds — a middle name the bank does not have, or a differently formatted date of birth, is usually the cause. Failing that, type the password the bank told you to use; the app will remember which rule worked, not the password.

The statement opens but nothing is found

Statements that are scans carry no text layer, and there is nothing to parse. Check the detected issuer at the top of the review screen and override it if it is wrong.

A figure looks wrong

Open Activity and check the underlying rows first — a mistyped category is the usual cause, because a row typed as a fee earns no points and counts towards no waiver threshold. Category and amount are editable on every transaction.

Reminders are not arriving

Confirm notification permission is granted for Cracker in Android settings, then toggle reminders off and on in the app to reschedule.