Hey everyone,
I’ve been traveling a lot lately for client meetings, specifically outside the Eurozone (mostly the UK and US). Back at the office, my finance colleague runs our master budget strictly in EUR.
The Problem: The “Pocket Trash” Expense Report
Whenever I buy a coffee in London or pay for a cab in New York, I shove the receipt in my pocket. Fast forward to the end of the month: I have a pile of faded, crumpled paper.
Not only do I have to manually type all of these into a spreadsheet, but I also have to play the “Exchange Rate Guessing Game.” I literally find myself Googling “What was the GBP to EUR exchange rate on Tuesday the 14th?” just so my colleague’s spreadsheets balance out. It is soul-crushing admin work.
The Solution: My Personal “Currency Converter Assistant” – Cassi
I decided to stop being the bottleneck. I spent about 45 minutes in n8n wiring up a private Telegram bot that handles the whole thing before I even leave the coffee shop.
How it works:
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The Snap – I pay for my £4.50 coffee, take a photo of the receipt, and send it to my Telegram bot. Then I throw the receipt in the trash.
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The AI Eyes – n8n catches the photo and hands it to the easybits Extractor, which pulls out the Invoice Number, Currency, and Total Amount.
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The Math – n8n pings a free Currency API to get the exact, up-to-the-minute exchange rate for GBP to EUR.
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The Handoff – It automatically calculates the EUR total and drops the original amount, the exchange rate used, and the final EUR amount straight into my colleague’s Google Sheet.
Why I love this: I haven’t brought a physical piece of paper back to the office in weeks. I don’t have to open a calculator app, and my colleague in Finance sees the expenses hit the budget in real-time, already converted to our base currency. It feels like magic.
The Workflow Logic
Telegram Trigger (Downloads image) → easybits Extractor (Extracts JSON) → HTTP Request (Fetches Exchange Rate) → Code Node (Does the math) → Google Sheets (Logs it)
If you’re interested, you can check out the officially approved workflow on n8n here:
For my fellow road warriors or solo founders – how are you guys handling multi-currency expenses? Anyone else using Telegram as a frictionless UI for internal tools?
Best,
Felix