How to turn on credit card alerts at U.S. Bank

Find the alert settings

1. Sign in to U.S. Bank online banking.
2. Open Profile & settings at the top of the page and choose Alerts & notifications. Notifications, then Settings, takes you to the same place.
3. On the Account activity page, choose your credit card in the menu at the top right.
4. Click All settings.

Quick setup, the other tab, turns on whole groups of alerts at once, and its transaction group reports purchases only when they're over $100. All settings lets you choose the one alert you need.

U.S. Bank's page on account alerts gives the route in the U.S. Bank Mobile App as the bell icon, then Notifications, Settings and Account activity. We haven't checked the app ourselves.

Turn on Debit Posted

1. In the Transaction section, open Debit Posted. U.S. Bank describes it as: “Get notified when a charge or debit is greater than an amount you set.”
2. Under Email, switch on the address you'll use for tracking.
3. Leave the amount at $1, the lowest U.S. Bank allows.
4. Click Save.

On a credit card, a debit is a charge, so this is the alert for your purchases. Credit Posted is the opposite: it reports credits, like refunds. Transaction Dollar Amount also reports purchases, but its lowest amount is $10, so it would miss most small ones.

Choose email rather than text messages. Email leaves a record that can be filed and read later, which is what makes the alerts useful for tracking. If the Gmail address you want isn't listed, U.S. Bank's page says to add it under Profile & settings, then Personal details. If you have more than one U.S. Bank credit card, choose each one in the menu and set it up too.

Send the alerts to a Gmail label

A Gmail filter keeps the alerts out of your inbox and collects them in one place:

1. In Gmail on a computer, click Show search options in the search bar.
2. In the From field, enter usbank@notifications.usbank.com, the address U.S. Bank's alerts come from. If yours come from a different address, use that one.
3. Click Create filter.
4. Select Skip the Inbox (Archive it) and Apply the label, and choose or create a label such as Expenses.
5. Select Also apply filter to matching conversations so alerts already in your mailbox get the label too.
6. Click Create filter.

Other U.S. Bank alerts can come from the same address, so the label may collect a few of those too. If you'd rather keep those in your inbox, wait for your first purchase alert, then edit the filter under Settings, See all settings, Filters and Blocked Addresses, and add that alert's subject in the Subject field. This step is optional if you use Bankless Budget, which recognizes emails that aren't purchases and doesn't add them to your budget.

What these alerts don't cover

• Alerts come when a charge posts. As the name says, Debit Posted reports a charge once it has posted to your account, which can be a day or more after you made the purchase.
• The merchant may be missing. Some U.S. Bank alerts give the amount but not where you spent it. You can look the charge up in your account to see the merchant.
• Purchases of $1 or less. These don't send an alert, so check your statement for them if they matter to you.
• No categories. An alert tells you the amount, not what kind of purchase it was.
• Credit cards only. We followed these steps with a U.S. Bank credit card. Checking accounts offer a different set of alerts.

It's worth reviewing your alert settings from time to time, and after you get a new card.

Using the alerts with Bankless Budget

Bankless Budget turns these alerts into a spending dashboard and a monthly budget. It reads the alerts in the Gmail label you choose and sends each alert's text to Google's Gemini AI, which pulls out the purchase details, like the merchant, amount and date, and suggests a category. On the Free and Plus plans you start each import yourself; on Pro, alerts are imported as they arrive. It never asks for your U.S. Bank login.

If an alert doesn't name the merchant, Bankless Budget doesn't guess. The purchase appears at the top of the Transactions page, in a list of transactions that need your input, with the details the alert did include. Click Update and add the merchant.