Not every expense arrives as a receipt. Parking, a cash tip, a client lunch paid by someone without the app — these come in as a sentence in Slack or a row in a form. This recipe turns that into a properly grouped expense.
The workflow shape
- Trigger — a form submission, a Slack message in a dedicated channel, or a new row in a sheet. Ask for the four things you actually need: amount, date, merchant or description, and which client, project, or trip it belongs to.
- Resolve the group — use the group dropdown, which is populated live from your own account, so the person filling the form picks from real groups rather than typing a name that will not match. Same for category.
- Create Expense — the cash-expense action writes the record.
- Confirm — reply to the submitter with what was logged, and link Review expenses.
The sibling actions follow the same shape when the input is a different kind of spend: Add Mileage for a trip, Add Income for money coming in.
Assign to an existing group, do not invent one
The Group value must be a client, project, or trip that already exists in your
account. A free-text field that lets someone type "Acme " with a trailing space
creates a second bucket that looks identical in a list and splits the totals on
every report afterwards. Drive the field from the live dropdown, or validate the
submission against the group list before the create step.
Retry safety
Writes are retry-safe — replaying the same action creates exactly one spreadsheet row, verified in live QA. If a form submission fires twice because someone double-clicked, or your platform retries after a timeout, you get one expense, not two.
The division of labour
ExpenseBot supplies structured expense data and Gmail receipt capture to Make workflows — extraction, duplicate detection, review, and the spreadsheet record. Make handles external triggers, routing, reminders, and notifications.
The boundary
An expense entered this way has no receipt image attached to it, because there was no file. Where your tax authority expects substantiation, capture the receipt too — see the Gmail, Drive and Slack recipes. Estimates and treatment are educational — confirm with your tax professional.
Where to build it
- Choose the right connection for your AI
- Connect ExpenseBot to Zapier's MCP Client — beta, usable today
- Does ExpenseBot work with Make.com? — native app submitted and in review