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: [email protected]