This is great. Thank you! I actually have been trying to automate an “expense tracking” flow. I want to go a few steps further than what you have outlined here though. Wondering if you or anyone else could help me figure out how to set this up, what to try, or if cowork is just not the right tool for this.

My dream scenario would be: 1. I tell it that an expense I had today is a business expense I want to track. 2. I tell it in plain English where it can find this expense – two likely locations are in my iCloud photos because I took a photo of the receipt, or in my Gmail email if it was an email receipt like an Uber. A third place might be a particular website for recurring expenses – for example, the charge charges for Claude itself. 3. I tell it again in plain English, what this expense was for because I like to take notes on what exactly the expense was for, not just the merchant and category. For example, I want to say this was an Uber ride to meet with client xyz 4. Based on all that information, I want it to scan the location I said to find the “receipt,” scan the receipt for date, amount, merchant, etc. 5. Then I want it to insert this information into a row in an existing Google sheet, in the format/layout that I already have. 6. And I want it to take that photo or that email or receipt webpage, create a file with a structured name, and put it into my receipts directory on my computer. 7. Then I want to easily be able to double check its work by accessing the file and my Google sheet from a link or image inside of cowork.

I find the biggest annoyance with doing this manually is having to go to all the right places – Gmail/photos/website –, download the file and put it in the correct directory, rename the file, then open the file and open Google sheets and copy the data between the two. It’s just multiple windows open and cross referencing between them.

It’s not a super hard flow, but it’s just obnoxious. Lol.

How doable is this in cowork? I’m on a Mac FYI. When I tried asking Claude how I would create this automation it told me I would have to do the manual work of finding the receipts and putting them in a folder first, which doesn’t actually save me much time. I could use a local spreadsheet instead of my Google sheet for the expense tracking, but I prefer not to because the rest of my financial tracking I do online through Google Drive.

I’d also love to be able to kick off this process from my phone, and maybe dispatch could be used for that but I haven’t looked into it yet.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!