Turning a stack of receipts into an expense sheet with AI
The start of every month looks the same: a pile of paper receipts, a few photos on your phone, and a spreadsheet that needs every line typed by hand. The Expense bookkeeping bot in Piskes Agent reads invoice and receipt photos straight from a working folder, builds last month’s expense sheet, and flags payments still due.
What the bot does
- Role: accounting. Reads invoices and receipt photos, builds a monthly expense sheet, reminds you of payment deadlines.
- Skills: vision (reading photos), read/write XLSX, file operations inside the working folder.
- Routine: 9am on the 1st of the month — “gather every invoice/receipt recorded last month into one expense sheet (date, vendor, description, amount before tax, VAT, total, payment status), export it as xlsx into the working folder and summarize total spend by category. Do not send it to anyone.”
The bot writes numbers to a file — it never sends the report or pays anything on your behalf.
Set up in 10 minutes
- Install Piskes Agent and configure a model provider (pick one with vision support if you want to scan photographed invoices).
- Marketplace → Bots → Expense bookkeeping → Add.
- Create a fixed folder, e.g.
D:\Expenses\<year>-<month>, and drop invoice photos/PDFs into it as they come in. - Message it once: “From now on invoices live in
D:\Expenses\<year>-<month>. Columns needed: date, vendor, description, pre-tax, VAT, total, payment status.” - Try it: “Compile this month’s expenses.” The bot reads each photo/PDF, extracts the amount and vendor, and exports the sheet.
The following month, at 9am on the 1st, it compiles automatically and gives you a category summary.
What happens to your data
- Invoice photos stay in the folder on your machine; the bot sends only the image content it needs to a vision-capable model to extract the numbers.
- Overwriting the previous expense sheet could lose data — at the Ask first level, the bot stops and asks before overwriting.
Tips
- Photograph invoices right when you receive them, with dated filenames (
2026-09-15-electric-bill.jpg), so the bot has less to guess. - Digital PDF invoices with real text usually read more accurately than blurry photos.
- Need a formal letter chasing a vendor for payment? Pair it with the Document drafting bot.
Cost: on the free plan with your own key, reading and compiling 20–30 photographed invoices a month costs more tokens than text-only work, but still a few cents to a dollar or so depending on the model.