n8n Telegram Receipt Expense Tracker w/ Gemini & Google Sheets

Capture receipt expenses in Telegram—auto-extracted with Gemini and saved to Google Sheets

This n8n workflow lets you send receipt photos or documents to a Telegram bot, automatically extracts vendor, amount, date, category, and payment method using Google Gemini, and then appends the verified expense to Google Sheets. If Gemini isn’t confident, it asks you to confirm the category right in Telegram.

What this workflow does

• Listens on Telegram for incoming messages containing a photo or document (and for inline button callbacks).
• Downloads the receipt from Telegram and sends it to Google Gemini for extraction.
• Receives Gemini’s JSON output including vendor, amount, date, category, payment method, and a confidence score.
• Parses and normalizes data (invalid dates are normalized to null).
• If confidence > 0.65: saves the expense directly to Google Sheets and notifies you in Telegram.
• If confidence ≤ 0.65: stores the extracted expense and an n8n resume URL in an n8n Data Table, then prompts you in Telegram to confirm the detected category via inline buttons.
• Resumes the workflow after your selection: either uses the existing category or asks you to choose a new one, then saves to Google Sheets and deletes the pending record.

Use cases

• Busy teams capturing expenses on the go by snapping receipts and sending them to a Telegram bot.
• Freelancers or SaaS operators maintaining a clean expense log without manually typing every receipt.
• Automation engineers deploying a reliable Telegram → Gemini → Google Sheets expense pipeline with human-in-the-loop category confirmation.

Technical details

• Telegram integration (Telegram bot credentials) for photo/document ingestion and inline button confirmations.
• Google Gemini (PaLM) API credential for JSON-based receipt extraction and confidence scoring.
• Google Sheets for appending approved expenses.
• n8n nodes used: if, set, code, wait, switch, telegram (plus an n8n Data Table for pending approvals).

Setup tip: connect your Telegram bot credential to all Telegram nodes, add your Google Gemini (PaLM) API credential, and configure the Google Sheets destination.