Multi-Modal Expense Tracking with Telegram, Gemini AI & Google Sheets

🤯 Problem of Traditional Bookkeeping 🔀 Context switch kills the habit: Because bookkeeping lives outside the apps you use every day, you postpone it → forget to log. 🧱 High input friction: You’re forced to fill rigid fields (amount/category/date/notes…), which is slow and discouraging for quick capture. 🎙️💸 Weak or pricey natural-language options: A few tools support voice/chat, but they’re often expensive, and the experience is hit-or-miss. 🔒📦 Limited data ownership: Records live on third-party servers, so privacy and control are diluted.

📲 How This Workflow Fixes It 💬 Put the capture back where you already are: Log expenses directly inside Telegram (or other channels) in a familiar chat—no new app to learn. ⚡ Ultra-low-friction, unstructured input: Send text, a voice note, or a receipt photo—the flow extracts amount · item · date, supports multiple languages and relative dates, and can split multiple expenses from one message. 🗂️📝 Your data, your sheet: Final records are written to your own Google Sheet (columnar fields or a JSON column). You keep full control.

🔗 Demo Google Sheet: click me

👥 Who Is This For 😤 Anyone fed up with traditional bookkeeping but curious about an AI-assisted, chat-based way to log expenses. 🤖 People who tried AI bookkeeping apps but found them pricey, inflexible, or clunky. 💵 Bookkeeping beginners who want frictionless capture first, simple review and categorize later.

🧩 How It Works 💬 Captures expenses from Telegram (text, voice note, or receipt photo). 🔎 Normalizes inputs into raw text (uses Gemini to transcribe voice and extract text from images). 🧠 Parses amount · item · date with an LLM expense parser. 📊 Appends tidy rows to Google Sheets. 🔔 Sends a Telegram confirmation summarizing exactly what was recorded.

🛠️ How to Set Up

1. 🔑 Connect credentials (once) TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN LLM_API_KEY GOOGLE_SHEETS_OAUTH

2. 🚀 Quick Start Setup:* Create a Google Sheet to store Log Expense* data and configure it in n8n. Telegram:* Fill in and verify the Telegram chatId*. Remember enable the workflow!*

🧰 How to Customize the Workflow 📝 Other user interaction channels: Add Gmail, Slack, or a website Webhook to accept email/command/form submissions that map into the same parser. 🌍 Currency: Extract and store currency in its own column (e.g., MYR, USD); keep amount numeric only (no symbols). 🔎 Higher-accuracy OCR / STT to reduce errors

📩 Help Contact: owenlzyxg@gmail.com