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

Description

🤯 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]