Fourteen receipts from eleven places, collected in one pass

What is the exact prompt?

Run it on the first of the month, scoped to the month that just closed:

"Collect every receipt and invoice for [month]. Search my email for: receipt, invoice, 'your order', 'payment confirmation', booking confirmations, plus anything from these senders: [airline, hotel chain, taxi app, the SaaS vendors you expense]. Then open these vendor portals in my session and download the [month] invoice from each: [list]. For every document found: log date, vendor, amount, currency, and a five-word description to the sheet [name], and save the PDF or attachment to [folder] named YYYY-MM-DD-vendor. Flag in a separate section: any charge over [threshold], any subscription that changed price versus last month, and any calendar travel day with no matching receipt. Do not submit, file, or email anything to anyone."

The last flag is the clever one. Cross-referencing travel days against receipts finds the missing taxi receipt while the trip is still fresh enough to recover it.

Why does the companion stop before filing?

An expense report is an attestation.

The sweep, the logging, the renaming and the gap-finding are mechanical and delegable. The claim that these were business expenses is yours, so the prompt puts you exactly at the signature.

The same boundary protects you from a receipt attributed to the wrong month or the wrong trip. You review a completed sheet in five minutes. In Strawberry, consequential actions pause on an approval card as well, but here the design carries it: the job ends at the sheet.

Make it a monthly routine

Schedule it for the 1st at 8am and the reconciliation sheet is waiting before finance asks.

Monthly beats continuous here, because receipts trickle in for days after a charge and one sweep over a closed month catches more. Add a late-arrivals run mid-month if your vendors invoice slowly.

Chasing other people's missing invoices is a different job with a different boundary, covered in invoice collection and invoice chasing. If your books live in Xero, the Xero integration covers the accounting side natively.

Three checks before you submit

Sum the sheet against your card statement total for the month.

A big mismatch means a missed source, usually the personal-email leak. Open two random saved PDFs and confirm they match the rows. Then read the flags section: the price-change flag regularly catches a quiet upgrade nobody remembers approving.

If the flags keep catching subscription drift, look at vendor renewals. Same skills, bigger target.

Frequently asked questions