#1 — IFTTT and Google Sheets: Tracking Business Expenses
Automate the creation of a spreadsheet list of receipts for tracking business expenses
The Challenge?
Every professional in business has to deal with this headache! Tracking receipts for expense reporting, or if you are in your own business, tracking expenses for business accounting and reporting purposes.
Since I don’t use a service (e.g., Expensify, etc.), I needed a simple way to capture my receipts for tax backup purposes and create an expense item list. IFTTT makes this easy!
The Goal
So, here is my outline of expected ongoing effort on my part:
- Spend money,
- iPhone scan & save receipt documentation, create receipt list in Google Sheets (automated)
- Modify receipt list (whenever I want to… effort is minimal)
- Open MS Excel on my desktop and click “Refresh Data” (this is also the file my accountant has access to).
- Easy analytics preparation from Excel, into summary dashboard, if desired.
How? Here’s The Process
Here is the workflow:
IFTTT — Applet ID 53446975d
“If a tag of receipt is added to note, then add row to spreadsheet in don@invenioadvisorsllc.com’s Google Drive”
Automation End Result
I automated the back-end of this process as well. A Microsoft Excel file I created imports the Google Sheet list of receipts into Excel and enables basic analysis, reporting and dashboards functionality.
Here is what the flow looks like:
About Don
“On a mission to challenge the status quo to a more productive and effective end…”
Don is passionate about helping professionals and organizations keep up and adapt to the changing business world that we operate in.
“What Do You Do?”
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