How to Track Tabby and Tamara Purchases in a Budget: One Expense, Three Transfers

A colleague showed me his tracker in August. His Electronics category read AED 600 for May, June, July and August, four identical months, and he was pleased with the consistency. He had bought one AED 2,400 phone in May. The other three lines were Tabby collecting its instalments, and the tracker had turned one purchase into a subscription. Nothing was wrong with the app. The bookkeeping rule was wrong, and it is the same rule that trips people up on credit cards, only shorter.

Is a buy now pay later instalment an expense?

Only the first one, and even that is better thought of as the first payment against an expense that has already happened in full.

Tabby’s own description of Pay in 4 is the whole schedule: “The first payment is collected at the time of purchase” and “the remaining ones are collected the same day every month according to your plan”. So on 15 May the phone costs AED 2,400. The shop is paid in full that day. What the buyer owes is AED 1,800, to Tabby, in three dated pieces. That is a debt, and a debt is not a category of spending.

At the trading company where I work, this is how every supplier invoice on credit terms is booked. Goods arrive on the 15th, the purchase is recorded on the 15th at the full invoice value, and the amount sits in accounts payable until the transfer goes out sixty or ninety days later. Nobody in the finance team books the payment as a purchase; the payment is the payable going to zero. The weekly report the finance manager reads is the aged payables list, not the bank statement, because the bank statement is late and the payables list is current.

Pay in 4 is a personal aged payables list with a maximum of three ageing buckets.

How to record a Tabby or Tamara purchase so the budget stays honest

The mechanic is three lines, and the first is the only one that touches a spending category.

May shows AED 2,400 of Electronics, which is what happened. June, July and August show AED 0 of Electronics and AED 600 of cash leaving the account each month against a liability that ends at zero on 15 August. The budget category is hit once, in the month the decision was made. The cash-flow view still shows the AED 600 going out, because it does.

The instalments are not the cost of the phone. They are the schedule for paying a cost that was already incurred.

The reason this matters more than tidiness is stacking. Three purchases in three consecutive months, each split in four, produce a fourth month with AED 1,800 of transfers and no purchases at all. On a cash-basis tracker that month looks like a spending month, and the month the purchases were actually made looks cheap. Decisions get made on the wrong month.

The liability line has a second job. The Central Bank’s 2023 framework caps what a restricted licence provider can extend at “AED 20,000 or three months’ verifiable net income for the borrower”, and defines the product as credit granted “for a period of not more than 12 months” and “without interest being charged”. Twenty thousand dirhams of interest-free, unlisted debt is easy to carry without noticing. A running liability total is the only place it becomes a single number.

What changed in July 2026: the balance is on the credit report

Until this summer the instalments lived only in the app. On 27 July 2026 the Etihad Credit Bureau said BNPL account information from Tabby and Tamara had been incorporated into credit reports, and that the addition “will apply to both existing and new customers of Tabby and Tamara in the UAE and will include relevant historical transactions”. Marwan Ahmad Lutfi, the bureau’s Director General, put the purpose plainly: “it is important that credit reports provide a broad view of an individual’s financial commitments.”

Two consequences follow for the tracker.

First, the liability line now has an external counterpart. A bank pulling the report for a car loan sees the same AED 1,800 the tracker shows, and it sees the payment history behind it. A tracker whose debt total agrees with the bureau is a tracker that predicts what the bank will say.

Second, a missed instalment is no longer a private matter between the buyer and an app. Tabby’s help page says “Customers will be charged collection charges if they miss their payment due date” and that “you cannot make other purchases until any overdue payments are completed”. Tamara’s position is different on the fee and identical on the record: “If you do miss a payment, no late fees will be charged whatsoever”, alongside a warning that delays can affect the credit score. The regulation puts a ceiling on the fee side: “The total fees, including late payment fees charged by a provider or agency on any short-term loan, must not exceed 30% of the initial loan amount.” There is no ceiling on what a late mark costs at the next loan application.

Whatever fee does land, it is a real expense in the month it is charged. It carries a category of its own, Fees or Interest, never Electronics, because it was not the phone’s price. The tracking rule from a returned item applies in reverse: a cost that was not part of the purchase does not get folded into the purchase.

Where the plan of more than four payments changes the arithmetic

Tabby’s Pay Later page notes that “A service fee may apply if you choose plans with more than 4 payments”. The moment a fee exists, the purchase has a price and the credit has a price, and they belong on separate lines: the item at its shop price in its category, the service fee under Fees on the day it is charged. Blending the two makes the phone look more expensive than the shop sold it for, and makes the credit look free when it was not.

My own rule is one liability account per provider, one expense on checkout day, and a transfer on each collection date. It is the same treatment a credit card gets, and in Masrofna the card payment and the Tabby instalment are both transfers for that reason. The monthly spending report then answers the question it is supposed to answer, which is what was bought, and the debts view answers the one the bureau is now also answering.