n8n Telegram Alerts: 50/30/20 Google Sheets Budget Monitor

Get instant Telegram alerts when your 50/30/20 Google Sheets budget goes off track

This n8n workflow monitors your Google Sheets Transactions budget, recalculates monthly totals for Needs/Wants/Savings, and sends a Telegram message the moment any category exceeds its target share based on the 50/30/20 rule.

What this workflow does

• Triggers on new transactions: It runs whenever a new row is added to the Transactions sheet (polled every minute).
• Recalculates current-month spend: It reads all rows from the Transactions tab and filters to the current month using the America/Chicago timezone.
• Excludes income movement rows: Rows marked as Income and Transfer are excluded from the budget calculations.
• Computes 50/30/20 totals and percentages: For each bucket (Needs, Wants, Savings), it totals spending, calculates each bucket’s actual percentage, and flags whether it’s over target.
• Logs results in Google Sheets: It appends one summary row per bucket to a Summary tab (date, bucket, actual, target %, actual %, and over).
• Alerts via Telegram only when needed: It builds a Telegram message listing any buckets over target and includes the rounded total spend—then sends it to your configured chat only if at least one bucket is over target.

Use cases

• Budget accountability: receive immediate Telegram notifications when spending breaks your Needs/Wants/Savings limits.
• Personal finance automation: keep a live Google Sheets budget summary synced with your transactions.
• Ops-style budgeting: SaaS operators can monitor recurring spending categories with consistent rules and alerts.

Technical details

• n8n nodes: Google Sheets Trigger, Google Sheets (read/append), Code, if, Telegram, and Sticky Note.
• Requirements: A Google Sheets file with a Transactions tab containing columns for Date, Description, Bucket, Category, and Amount, plus a Summary tab for appended results.
• Setup: Configure Google Sheets OAuth credentials, then set the spreadsheet ID and sheet names in the trigger, read, and append steps.