How To Build A Fully Automated Finance Tracker In Notion

[@MartinSchabbauer]

Tack! Danke! Sitting in a coffee shop and enjoying following your excellent video step-by-step.

[@mfreihaendig]

So happy to hear that! Thanks a lot 😇

[@salarsalahi]

Amazing tutorial. Thank you

[@mfreihaendig]

Ohhhh really happy to hear that! 😇

[@Simbreaker603]

This is incredible content man. so helpful

[@mfreihaendig]

Glad to hear that! 😇

[@victorraulsegurameza9540]

So good! Thanks for the info

[@mfreihaendig]

Glad you like it 😇

[@NathanGuoKL]

can i check why my month won't update automatically from relay, i need to manually choose the month

[@samiraordahi]

That's amazing!! Thank you so much for this video. Pleaseeee make more videos about Notion automations, like onboarding or follow up. 🙏🏼🙏🏼

[@mfreihaendig]

Oh yes, will do! 😍 anything specific that you‘d love to see for the follow up flow? 💪🏻

[@samiraordahi]

@@mfreihaendig Thank you so much! I would love to see an automation to the onboarding process. Creation and sending of contract and creation of a portal in Notion related to the CRM client.

[@imThomasHarris]

Incredibly helpful and I intend to use it for a long time if I can get it fully up and running. My hurdle at the moment is the 100 iterations per run and a credit card statement. Would you be able to share the simplest or a recommended workaround?

[@mfreihaendig]

So you have statements with more than hundred entries at a time? Any easy way to increase the frequency of statements? Otherwise, I‘d probably set up a local automation to split the pdf into several entries 💪🏻

[@10Lumo]

So how do you get you finance into google drive inf the first place?

[@mfreihaendig]

When you download your statements, simply save them to one of the automatically syncing gdrive folders on your machine 😇

[@10Lumo]

@@mfreihaendig which means it's not fully automated right? You still have to manually download the statements. Any idea how to automate this in Europe? I've seen many websites that use plaids to transfer transactions, but plaids do not feature European banks... All I've found is qonto for business, which has a native notion integration and I think bunq has some integration as well. But It's pricy just for these features.

[@cchurchlead]

Hi Matthias, I was wondering why you used the Find Page in Months part in the video? My thought was that you included it to find the page in the month's database that correlates to the transformed text and add that relation page to the database item but i didn't see it in the video. I'm having trouble on my side as I test it.

[@mfreihaendig]

Yeah I somehow forgot to show that the part where we map it 😅 Just add the page found during the search step in the relation property when creating the new entry 💪🏻

[@cchurchlead]

Is it also possible to have the link to the invoice in google drive be the value in a Google Drive Property in Notion or would the link not be generated that quickly? Alternatively, can it be uploaded to an image property through the same method?

[@mfreihaendig]

No you can easily get the share link 💪🏻 Uploading to Notion won’t work since the api doesn’t allow for file uploads atm

[@samiraordahi]

Again, thank you so much for this! Today I tried to replicate this automation (in my case for a credit card statement). And it works! But Relay only runs 25 outflows, and in my PDF statement in the Driver's folder there is 39 outflows. (Actually we have 60 transactions but 39 outflows) I already tested Chat GPTs prompt with the file and it recognizes all the 39 outflows, but Relay doesn't. Just 20, 25. Do you know why? Thanks a lot!

[@Ran-qb8vf]

Great Video, thanks! I feel like I'm going to want to put the Year in the Month Name to keep things straight year over year. Is there something I'm missing that will help differentiate row September from row September?

[@mfreihaendig]

Just the year property relation - by which you can filter and create views accordingly 💪🏻 But you can ofc also add it directly to the property name 😇

[@cchurchlead]

Hey Matthias. Have you tried this use case for scanned receipts into your Google drive? I’m wondering if Google Drive’s OCR will be able to extract the data such as the store name and the absolute total of the receipt vs other prices found on the receipt

[@mfreihaendig]

Yes that should work! Just gotta give it some instructions on what to look out for 💪🏻

[@danielisrael5365]

Hi, do you know why I am getting an error "Unable to extract data from PDF Files" it worked when I uploaded an invoice but not when uploading a credit card statement. I tried it in chat GPT with JSOn and it worked fine it just seems to not be working in Relay.

[@mfreihaendig]

Hmmm sounds like a bug - have you contacted their support? 💪🏻

[@jacobbank89]

Really great video, super thorough and clear!

[@mfreihaendig]

Thank you! 😇

[@LuceliaSoleil]

Hi what is the name of the app you use i heard it as "related app?

[@mfreihaendig]

Relay.app 😎

[@SabinaDemeterova-m4e]

I downloaded your template and followed this video but I am having trouble with all my credit card statements being added and being categorised please help

[@mfreihaendig]

What’s the issue you‘re running into?

[@SabinaDemeterova-m4e]

@@mfreihaendig Only 5 of the 9 pdf statements are showing up in the data, all the formats are the same, when I run the test it asks me to pick a file

[@fionamcmaster2566]

Great video, I have been watching lots of videos and finding Notion a great tool. Now i will be add Relay to automate repetitive inputs and make it even more valuable. Can you advise if it is possible to add the oiginal file to the database page as an image etc so itcould show inthe Gallery view

[@mfreihaendig]

Currently not, since you can’t upload files to Notion via the api - but you could add it as a link on the cover image for the page which achieves nearly the same result 😇

[@BradyPatterson]

Do you think this could be done with Obsidian instead of Notion?

[@mfreihaendig]

Does obsidian have an api for you to use? 😇 it’s been forever that I played around with it 😅

[@BradyPatterson]

@@mfreihaendig Yes, their is an API. I just didn't like using Notion which is why I ask and I'm only technical enough to follow instructions, not troubleshoot if there's coding involved

[@rafaelgraziani9882]

I'm trying to do something a little different. I have a Categories database, which in the case of the video would be equivalent to the "Months" database you created. In my prompt, I tell it that depending on the concept, it should tell me which category the concept falls into, and I give it a list of categories to choose from. For this reason, I skip the data transformation step because the AI already gives me the text as I need it. Then in the find page step, it makes a perfect match. That is, if the concept of my expense was for a hamburger, the artificial intelligence classifies it as food and from there finds the page called food in my categories database. Then in the last step it adds the page to my expense database, but when I go to check, it doesn't relate that the expense was for food. Am I skipping any step? I don't see that in the video you do anything else to connect them, just with the Find page and then add the item to the database. Could you please help me?

[@mfreihaendig]

Yes, that is something that I actually forgot to show in the video - thanks a lot for highlighting it! In your last step, the one where you add the new entry, you need to map the page found in the search step in the category field - then it will properly create the relation 😇

[@EdwardPoveda]

Great video. Why do we need the additional databases? The total month's income and expenses can be displayed as a chart. I think there is no need for both the month and year databases, Am I missing something?

[@mfreihaendig]

If you’d like to see your month-over-month performance as a more stationary, semi-spreadsheet view it’s still nice to have it separate 😇 Plus, over multiple years it will be a bit easier - but you could remove them if you want to simplify it 💪🏻

[@xavthomas]

Why can't they just be properties in the database? Like a display month or display year formula from date?

[@BradyPatterson]

Awesome explanation. Hopefully they offer a login via email at some point. I hate logging in socially

[@mfreihaendig]

Same! Will share the feedback with the team 😇

[@cives]

Me too. That's their price. They "sell" your contact to Google or Microsoft, in this case, under the disguise of simplifying the connection for you.

[@cives]

@@mfreihaendig When they will implement the email login, they will have me in; meanwhile, Google has already too much information of mine. Giving them access to my financial transactions is way too much, to be flooded with ads and whatsoever.

[@mfreihaendig]

@@cives actually no, that’s not how these oauth providers work - it just simplifies the app building process since now you don’t need to store accounts and pw yourself. There‘s no data sharing (this isn’t the old Facebook pixel)

[@ASuppi]

Hi Matthias, you've explain very well the process although I'm still learning some basic stuff. That's why I'd like to understand why you use the formulas instead the the rollups in the month database? I'm asking you that because I thought I got the usage of rollups and now I'm a little bit confused. Thanks

[@mfreihaendig]

You could rollups here as well - in this case, the functionality is the same! Rollups vs formulas is sometimes a relevant decision (for example, you currently can’t filter for a specific result of a formula - but you can for a rollup), but in this case you can use whatever you prefer 😇

[@ASuppi]

@@mfreihaendig Thanks Matthias.

[@ASuppi]

@@mfreihaendig Another question: in months I'd like to add January, Feb, March, etc,,, but 2023. What should I do? I added another list of months and i changed the YEAR colum but I guess it's not done properly. Thanks

[@eMotionFlowing]

Looks nice, thanks but I don't understand how to modify the file from the bank. I don't understand the data transfer...which columns must the exported file from the bank have? Ich habe 4 unterschiedliche Banken und weiss nicht wie ich die Daten in Notion bekomme…ich kann Excel Files Downloaden…und dann?

[@mfreihaendig]

This method works with pdfs, so no need to export a csv - and in terms of columns, that depends on what you want to see 💪🏻 Payee, amount and date would be the standard 😇

[@eMotionFlowing]

@@mfreihaendig Thanks…I don't quite understand it yet. It's very complex. 😅 Is the template available for purchase?

[@mfreihaendig]

@@eMotionFlowing It's free! But the template only involves the Notion part, since it's currently not possible to share the relay flow as a template unfortunately - so you'd need to use the video step-by-step to replicate it 😇 Definitely not the easiest one - if you're new to automations, I recommend you start trying to build this instead: kzbin.info/www/bejne/enjRYpuHrbibisk

[@AndreaRocaRuiz]

Hi! My category formula doesn't seem to work... I've copied the formula from the video and adapted it to my data --> prop("Items").filter(and(current.prop("Type")=="Outflow",current.prop("Category")=="Hogar")).map(current.prop("Amount")).sum() It's weird because it doesn't give back an error message, it give sa 0.00€ amount, although I already have Items with the "Hogar" category in them. Do you know what may be going wrong? The Total spent formula is working though! Thank you!!!

[@mfreihaendig]

Is "Hogar" 100% spelled the same? Trailing space, emojis, capitalisation? That's the most likely culprit