Personal Finance Automation: A Telegram Bot and AI That Track My Money
A personal finance system I built for myself with Make and AI. I text a Telegram bot in plain language and it logs the transaction, and an AI email intake reads my receipts and bank alerts so my ledger stays current on its own.
I built a simple personal finance system for myself, with AI doing the boring parts. It has two sides.
The Telegram bot
I message my bot the way I would text a friend, no set format. It reads what I wrote and records expenses, income, transfers, card payments, and installment payments. It writes each one straight into my Google Sheets ledger, then replies with a confirmation so I can see exactly what got logged. That is it. No app to open, no form to fill.
The AI email intake
The second side watches my finance emails on its own. AI reads the receipts, bank alerts, payment confirmations, and card statements as they come in. If a receipt is an image, it runs through OCR first so the text can be read.
The part I care about most is the judgment. If a transaction is clear, it gets recorded automatically. If it is unclear, it goes to a Pending list instead of the AI guessing. I would rather review a handful of odd ones than clean up wrong entries later.
What it does for me
I track a lot less by hand now. Logging an expense takes a single text, my balances stay clean, and receipts and bank alerts are far easier to capture. The only thing left for me to do is review the items that actually need a second look.
The stack
Make and Make AI Agents run the logic. A Telegram bot handles the chat side. Gmail, Google Drive OCR, and Google Docs handle the email and receipts. Google Apps Script and Google Sheets hold the ledger. HTTP and JSON modules tie the pieces together, ChatGPT Pro does the reading and reasoning, and I track the build in Notion.
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