Traditionally, I often log expenses into the Notion Database every time I spend the money. The problems are:

• Logging the expense instantly is inconvenient sometimes.
• I’m an absent-minded person, and some transactions I couldn’t remember during the day.

Even though I have tried to create some templates to quickly log the expenses, all things are still manual, and it's easy to miss some transactions. You know the human instinct is lazy :D

Create the template for each expense type to quickly log the transaction

(Fact: Missing a log of a small amount of money is okay, but if you miss a big expense in a day, it might give you the wrong context of how you spend the money.)

That’s why I’m seeking an alternative solution, which is more robust and automatic than this solution.

Here is what I’m finding:

• Create a voice-over shortcut to log the expense → Cool, but it's still manual
• Some financial applications have the internal expense management feature, but it requires you to use their application → Have to stick with them, not flexible. In fact, I have used many financial applications.
• Recently, many applications in the App Store encourage us to record expenses in a Locket UI style by leveraging the psychology of social proof. → Cool, but still manual.
• Orchestrate automatic expense logging workflow — Zapier. → Great, UX/UI friendly to set up, but it costs a lot to run the workflow.
• and a dozen things…..

Then I asked AI for my purpose, it suggested a solution to me that I think is better than ever (til this post is released).

It guides me to orchestrate the automation workflow using Google Gmail, Google Script, and Notion. To summarize the workflow in the simplest way to understand:

1. Do a transaction

   ↓

2. Get email notifications from the bank

   ↓

3. Find the transaction email

   ↓

4. Filter & Extract the email content

   ↓

5. Save the record to the database

The full workflow will look like this

The goals of this workflow are:

• Read the notification email automatically
• Get the transaction information
• Save to the database (Notion) to track the expense

This step answers the question: which emails should I collect? From the bank notifications, there are varied notification types, so you need to collect the emails properly to extract them. There are 2 labels you need to create first:

BANK_TXN:

This label is the flag to know when the emails haven’t been extracted, but it ensures that it is the transaction email from the bank. It means every time the system only fetches all the emails that have the label BANK_TXN

You can categorize email types using a conditional query. For example, I will filter all the emails that have the subject “Balance changed“ and come from this domain: “vpbank.com“, then mark them as the Label: BANK_TXN.

Note: You can extend the query if you want to catch more conditions.

BANK_DONE:

This label is the flag to know when the emails have been saved to the database, and the system doesn’t extract them again.

The results will look like this

1. First, you need to create the database. This is the place where you store the expense logs. You can change other ways to store the data; it depends on your purpose.
   
2. Go to https://www.notion.so/my-integrations to create a new integration. Then, share the database for integration

(Please research the Notion guide for more details)

Go to https://script.google.com/ to create a new project, then write your logical transaction handling based on this workflow:

Every 1 minute:
   ↓
Scan Gmail (BANK_TXN)
   ↓
Parse email
   ↓
Filter (fraud / duplicate)
   ↓
Push into Notion Database
   ↓
Mark BANK_DONE

The code to handle the logical handling

Run the workflow every 5 minutes

After I orchestrated this workflow, all transactions were collected automatically

In addition to the workflow, I use AI to “vibe-code” a dashboard when I want to see the statistics and host it on Vercel.

Techstacks I use:

• Framework: NextJS, Typescript.
• Skill: UI style - https://swiss.ziki.boo/

In this enhancement, I leverage AI to:

• Classify the transaction type (if the transactions are uncategorized)
• Give me the insights into my spending behavior

(All these actions are triggered every visit the site)

It’s not a single prompt or a single orchestration to get the final results. To get it done, it took me a lot of time to research & test til it worked properly. So please calm down to figure out the workflow on your own :D