How to create an excel with artificial intelligence where you can add the expenses of your digital purchase receipts

Let’s explain to you how to create a spreadsheet with your expenses using artificial intelligence. Specifically, what we are going to do is put all your purchase receipts in a folder, and have the AI ​​read them, extract the totals, write them down in the spreadsheet and then add the total.

It seems complex, but it is easier than it seems. For our example we are going to use the PDF tickets that are sent to you by email when you configure the Mercadona digital ticketalthough you can also use photographs of tickets. For the spreadsheet we are going to use LibreOffice, as it is a free and open source alternative to Office.

To carry out the actions we will use Claude Coworkthe AI ​​assistant of Claude that can do actions on your computer. The negative part is that To use this tool you must have a paid account in this artificial intelligence chat, but the positive part is how much you can later do with it.

There are workflow tools that allow you to automate this and do it online, but we are going to start by explaining this simpler method because it is all local, within your computer, and sharing less data with third parties.

Make preparations first

It is important to be organized when carrying out this task. Therefore, what we are going to do is go to the file explorer on our computer and create a folder. In my case I have called it Tickets. Inside, we will create a subfolder where you can put the digital tickets which we will call “Ticket PDFs”, and then the spreadsheet file which we will call “Total Purchases”.

We will also create the basic structure of the spreadsheetso that it will then be easier for us to describe to the AI ​​what we want. On this sheet I have included the date, the total of the ticket, and then a column to add the link to the PDF file for each one. Here, you will be able to customize this as you need.

Now simply Put the tickets in PDF inside the folder that we have created to store the tickets. You can do this by hand with the ones you have, and then update it with the ones that arrive later, because we will also tell you how to ask the AI ​​to update everything.

This technique has many variants. For example, adding a specific column in the spreadsheet you can also add the name of the supermarket in order to manage the expenses of several of them, or make a different sheet for each one within the same file. You can make things as complex as you want.

Now ask AI to do the work for you

Now it’s time to get to work. Let’s open the Claude application on the computer and choose the option cowork. Here, the first thing will be click on the option Work in a folder. When you do this, you will have to choose the folder where you have included the subfolder with the PDFs and where you have created the spreadsheet file. This way the AI ​​will work only within this space without touching the rest of the files on the computer.

Once you have done this, tap write a prompt asking it what you want it to dowhich in this case is asking it to read the PDFs with the tickets, extract the information and put it in the place you want within your spreadsheet. I have used this prompt, where I also specify the columns where each content goes:

I want you to analyze the content of all the PDFs in the “Ticket PDFs” folder. These are purchase tickets. In all of them, I want you to extract both the date of the ticket and the total you have spent and put them in the “Date” and “Total (€)” columns of the “Total purchases.ods” file. Within this file, I also want you to create a link in the PDF Link column that, when clicked, opens the PDF file it belongs to.

This prompt You can modify it depending on what your spreadsheet is like.but always specifying in which column each item goes, or on which page of the spreadsheet if you have created one for each supermarket. You can even make a sheet for the totals, and ultimately ask them to use any of Excel functions or the program you are going to use.

Now, you have to wait a few minutes for Claude to process your request and complete the task. When you do, you will be able to enter the file you created before, and you will see that it has updated it. You can make changes to the file for font size or whatever you want, and Claude will then take that into account. You can also tell the AI ​​if it has done something wrong, such as not including links, so it can correct and add it.

Now, you can ask him to do extra work like adding a column below with the total. And then, When you add more files you can ask it to update the file reviewing the new PDFs that you have added and adding the missing ones to the list.

And that’s it. With all this you will have a spreadsheet that you can update every time you add more tickets. You can also ask him to do it by reading the content of photos, and other tickets that you also have in PDF.

In Xataka Basics | Claude: 23 functions and some tricks to get the most out of this artificial intelligence