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📚 Automate Expense Tracking With AI
How to build an automation to log company expenses
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Hello AI Enthusiast,
Today, we're exploring a time-saving automation that's transformed our expense tracking process. We'll show you how to build a system that lets your team upload receipt images and automatically extracts and logs the expense data.
The Problem
Expense management is a notorious time sink for businesses of all sizes. The traditional workflow is painfully inefficient: employees collect paper receipts, manually enter details into spreadsheets, and finance teams spend time verifying each entry. This not only wastes valuable time but also introduces human error into your financial records.
A guided overview of how we solved it
After experiencing the pain of manual expense tracking firsthand, we decided to build an automation to solve this problem. Our receipt-to-spreadsheet automation uses AI to eliminate manual data entry from your expense tracking process. The system we've built allows anyone to submit receipts and have the important details automatically extracted and organized.
The complete automation flow works seamlessly: an employee drops a receipt image in the dedicated Slack channel and the expense is logged in our budgeting spreadsheet.
This overview covers the key components while intentionally simplifying the technical details. Full implementation instructions are available exclusively to our members. If you’re looking to integrate AI into your workflows or your clients’, joining our Membership is definitely worth considering.
Here’s what the workflow looks like and an overview of how we built it using Make.
Overview of the complete automation workflow
Step 1: Set Up a Dedicated Slack Channel
Create a channel specifically for expense submissions. We named ours "#expenses" – simple and clear.
Step 2: Configure Your Automation
Set up a webhook in Slack to monitor for new messages in your expenses channel, and add a filter to process only file attachments.
The filter module that ensures only file uploads trigger the automation
Step 3: Process and Store Receipt Files
When a receipt is uploaded, the automation saves it to Google Drive for record-keeping.
Configuring the file storage module to save receipts to Google Drive
Step 4: Extract Data with Gemini AI
This is where the magic happens. Gemini AI analyzes the receipt image to extract all relevant expense information.
Gemini AI integration for extracting data from receipt images
Step 5: Add Data to Your Expense Tracking Spreadsheet
Finally, the extracted expense details are added directly to your Google Sheet.
expense data automatically populated in Google Sheets
Here's a real example of the trigger and the end result:
The trigger: Somebody uploads a receipt to the dedicated Slack channel
The final result: expense data automatically populated in Google Sheets
Your Turn
Ready to transform your own expense tracking process? Start by assessing how much time your team currently spends handling receipts and entering expense data. Consider what an automation like this could save you in terms of hours and reduced errors.
While we've shown you a glimpse of what's possible with the tools we used, you might find other tools that better fit your workflow. Remember that even a partially automated process can dramatically reduce the burden of expense tracking.
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