Hi all — sharing a workflow that turns the “shoebox of email receipts” problem into a spreadsheet that’s actually ready for your accountant.
Most templates are fair-weather demos. This one is built for the day things go wrong:
- ✓ The same receipt is never logged twice, even across re-runs (ledger lookup by Gmail message ID before every append)
- ✓ A weird receipt can’t corrupt the ledger — strict structured-output parsing means a bad extraction produces no row, not a broken one
- ✓ Every AI and Google call retries automatically (3×, with backoff) — transient failures don’t silently kill a run
- ✓ Canvas setup notes (~15 minutes)
What it does: watches Gmail for receipt emails, has OpenAI read the attachment (PDF text or photo via vision) and extract the fields that matter (merchant, date, amount, currency, category — picked only from your category list), and appends each as a clean row in a Google Sheets ledger. On the 1st of each month it emails you last month’s spending summary by category — no formulas required.
Template (free, official library): Log email receipts to Google Sheets with Gmail and OpenAI | n8n workflow template
Feedback welcome — especially on categories: what taxonomy do you use for small-business expenses?