How to track Zemen Bank transactions automatically

Zemen Bank already texts you every time money moves. PennyWise reads those messages on your phone and builds your spending record from them — no manual entry, no bank login, nothing leaves the device.

What PennyWise reads from your Zemen Bank messages
SMS from Zemen Bank
Dear Customer your account 109xxxxxxxx has been credited with ETB 10000 from telebirr wallet 251922222222 with reference 109TEIN260350016 on 4-Feb-2026. Your Current Balance is ETB 10823.37. Thank you for banking with Zemen Bank
Read on your phone — nothing sent anywhere
+ብር10,000.00
Money in
Merchant
telebirr wallet 251922222222
Account
Reference
109TEIN260350016
Balance after
ብር10,823.37

A real Zemen Bank message format, run through the same parser that ships in the app. Try it on your own message in the parser tool.

How it works

  1. Install PennyWise and grant SMS permission. That permission is the whole product — it is how the app sees your Zemen Bank alerts.
  2. PennyWise scans the Zemen Bank messages already on your phone and back-fills your transaction history in seconds.
  3. Every new Zemen Bank alert is picked up as it arrives and categorised automatically. Budgets and spending trends update on their own.

Why not just use a bank-login app?

Apps that aggregate accounts ask for your net-banking or account credentials and hold your transaction history on their servers. PennyWise asks for neither. It has no account system, makes no network calls to read your money, and its full source is published under AGPL-3.0 so the claim is checkable rather than promised.

Common questions

Does PennyWise work with Zemen Bank?

Yes. Zemen Bank is one of 157 banks and payment services PennyWise recognises. Transaction alerts from Zemen Bank are detected automatically and turned into categorised transactions in ETB.

Do I have to type my Zemen Bank transactions in by hand?

No. PennyWise reads the transaction SMS Zemen Bank already sends you and creates the entry itself — amount, merchant, date, account and running balance where the message includes it.

Does PennyWise need my Zemen Bank net-banking login or password?

Never. PennyWise has no login to your bank and no connection to Zemen Bank at all. It only reads the SMS already sitting on your phone, which is why it needs SMS permission and nothing else.

Is my Zemen Bank transaction data sent anywhere?

No. Parsing runs entirely on your device. There is no server, no account and no analytics on your financial data, and the source code is public so this can be verified.

What if a message from Zemen Bank is read incorrectly?

You can paste the message into the parser tool on this site to see exactly what PennyWise extracts, and report it in one click if it is wrong. Parser fixes ship in the next release.

Other banks PennyWise supports in Ethiopia

9 supported in Ethiopia — see them all.

PennyWise is a free, open-source (AGPL-3.0) expense tracker. Bank SMS are parsed entirely on your device — nothing is uploaded, and there is no account to create. Browse all supported banks.