This AI Accounting Bot Saves Me Hours During Tax Season
Have an AI & GPT-4o bot automatically track all of your expenses. Build this simple workflow on your lunch break.
“I’m so excited to do my taxes!”
…said no one ever.
Managing expenses can be tedious, but in today’s Workflow of the Week, you'll learn how to automate expense tracking from your emails, and build a simple AI Bookkeeper that prepares your accounting data.
This step-by-step guide simplifies the process, saving you time and ensuring accurate records—perfect for entrepreneurs looking to streamline operations.
For a step-by-step walk through on how to set this up, please watch this video.
Pre-requisites:
Gmail (or similar email service) with label/tagging functionality
I use Airtable as my standalone database for everything…but you’ll need some type of spreadsheet or expense tracking software, with these 3 columns.
(e.g., Airtable, Google Sheets, QuickBooks) with at least these columns:
Entity: Who/what you're paying
Date Paid: A date column
Amount Paid: A currency column
How to Build this Automation:
Set Up Your Email Labels
In Gmail, create a label for expense-related emails (e.g., "Operations > Software Expenses").
Manually apply this label to emails containing expense details.
You could also set a “filter” to have it automatically label any messages with the phrase “you paid” or something similar you know is consistent.
Example - all my emails from PayPal whenever I buy something are the same subject line and format. I would set a filter for whenever an email comes across from paypal that says “You Paid” to be labeled with “Business Expenses” in gmail.
Prepare Your Database
Create 3 columns:
Entity: who you paid money to
Date Paid: date the payment was made
Amount Paid: how much you paid
Optionally, add a "Type" column (e.g., "Food & Bev," "Software") for categorization.
You can do this manually each week or have the GPT prompt (in the next step) automatically label the expenses
Build the Automation Workflow in Make
Add a “Watch Emails Module”:
Trigger the automation to watch for any incoming emails with the specific label you just created.
Set the module criteria to "unread emails only" to avoid duplicates.
Check the box for “Mark emails as read after processing.”
Add an OpenAI GPT Module with your prompt:
Use GPT to extract expense details from the the body of the incoming email.
Tell GPT to give its output in JSON format (its a programming language), with keys:
amount,date, andentity.Here’s the prompt I have inside the video
“Analyze this email, and extract the amount paid for a business expense, what date the expense was paid, and to what entity person or business it was paid to. Your output will be in JSON format, and will ONLY include 3 keys: "amount", "entity", and "date". Here's the exact format you will use need to use in your output for each key:
"amount" = "XX.XX"
"date" = "YYYY-MM-DD
"entity" = business name in english spelling & capitalization
Email Subject: {{map to the subject line}}
Email Body: {{map to the body text}}”
Add a Parse JSON Module
Use a "Parse JSON" module to separate the extracted data into usable variables:
amount,date, andentity.Simply map it to the output of the GPT module and it will do the rest.
Add your Finance Software or Expenses Tracking Database (Airtable for me)
Map from the “Parse JSON” module the:
amount, date, andentityvariables to the corresponding database columns.Test the workflow by running it with labeled expense emails.
Optional Add-On’s
Create an Expense Dashboard inside Airtable
Build a visual dashboard in Airtable (or similar) to track total expenses, categorize spending, and analyze trends.
You can also have your revenue and income flow into this dashboard, to keep track of profitability.
Benefits of this AI Bookkeeping Workflow:
Automates expense tracking from emails to a database.
No more loose ends and hours wasted communicating with accounting or doing your taxes…its prepared for you in real-time.
Eliminates manual data entry by extracting the email & expenses data with GPT.
Saves hours on bookkeeping and reduces human error.
Perfect for solopreneurs and small businesses to who need to know the “numbers” & cash flow.
See you in the next Workflow of the Week, Autopreneur.
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Nice! Thanks for sharing it!