Can Grok Bot take over filing receipts?
Hand it over and walk away. You stay out of it.
- Costs you
- Two hours in a panic, once a quarter
- Who runs it
- The bot
- Category
- Invoicing & books
Receipts arrive by email all year and get dealt with in one miserable afternoon before a deadline. The work itself is trivial · find the PDF, name it sensibly, put it somewhere · and it's only painful because it's deferred. A bot doing it the day each receipt arrives turns a quarterly panic into nothing at all. Be careful about one thing: filing is safe, categorising is not. A bot guessing which expense category something belongs to is a bot quietly introducing errors into a tax return, so the prompt keeps it to filing and marks every guess as a guess.
The prompt
Written for a bot that already has a browser, a terminal and your logins · paste it in whole.
Watch my email for receipts and invoices and file them as they arrive. Use my email and Dropbox. Daily: - Find anything that is a receipt, an invoice, or a payment confirmation. - Save the PDF to Dropbox under /receipts/YYYY-MM/, named supplier-date-amount.pdf. If it's in the email body rather than attached, print it to PDF. - Never delete or archive the original email. Monthly, on the 1st: - Build a CSV of last month: date, supplier, amount, currency, and a link to the file. - Add a category column with your best guess, and put the word GUESS in every row of it. My accountant decides categories, not you. - Message me the CSV and flag anything you couldn't read a total off. What not to do: - Don't categorise for real. Don't compute totals for tax. Don't touch my accounting software. - Don't guess an amount from a partial number. Mark it unreadable and let me look. - If something might be personal rather than business, file it and flag it. Don't decide.
The bot will need to sign into: gmail · dropbox
What you lose
- nothing · you were not enjoying this
- the annual review of what you spent money on, which some people find useful
What it costs you now
Two hours in a panic, once a quarter