Simplified Expenses

Expenses

Last Month

Reports

Data

Explore

Simplified Expenses

View and add expenses, review your spending habits and customize categories.

Denis Lin

With the Mindee Pack and this Coda doc, we’re bringing you world class image recognition technology to help you track and understand your expenses.

No more manually inputting information for each one of your transactions.

Simply upload a receipt, and the Mindee Pack takes it from there. ✨ It’s kind of like magic.

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Uploading a receipt

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Screen Shot 2022-08-03 at 2.58.20 PM.png

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Last Month Summary

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Exploring with Controls

Set Up Your Doc

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Copy this doc to your workspace →

Copy this doc

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Get a free Mindee account

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In your Mindee account, create an API key by following these steps:

Step 1: Click “Try out” on the Expense Receipt API on the right side of your dashboard

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Step 2: Go to “Settings” in the dropdown in the top right corner

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Step 3: Click API keys on the left hand side, then click “Create a new API key” →

Learn how

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Step 4: Copy the API key (click the white/blue copy button)

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Anywhere in this doc, type /mindee , click on the Mindee for Coda Pack, and connect your doc to your Mindee account! Or, just click this button →

Grab the Pack

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How It Works

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This template is already set up with all of the tables and charts synced up for you to start using it right away. You can take a look at the existing example data to give you a sense for what’s possible with this document, and yes, it is absolutely real data from the last 3-4 months of me and my wife’s lives traveling around in Europe and Asia. 😅

When you’re ready, 3 simple steps to get started:

Click this button to reset all the data and start fresh. Clean slate!

Delete sample data

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Please be patient, this could take a few moments.

Visit these two pages and add any categories or currencies you think you might be using that are missing from the list.

Expense Categories⁠

Currencies⁠

Choose the currency you’d like see your results in:

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EUR

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All of your expenses will get converted to this currency, taking into account the date of the purchase and the exchange rate on that day.

You’re all set up. Now, on to learning how to actually use this Coda Doc! 🤩

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`Add an item`⁠
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Adding a new expense or transaction is easy. All you have to do is submit a Coda form on one of these two pages. It’ll only take you a few seconds.

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Add a receipt⁠

: Use this form if you have a receipt

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Add an expense⁠

: Use this form if you don’t have a receipt and want to add the info manually

Download the Coda app for a much smoother experience!

Have an iPhone? →

Apple⁠

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Have an Android? →

Google⁠

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You’ll be able to take a picture of a receipt and immediately upload it to your Coda Doc.

I’ve added both forms to your shortcuts so you can easily access them on your mobile device, but if you want to add other pages to your bottom menu tabs, just add them as shortcuts!

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On mobile

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On desktop

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`Expenses`⁠
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Any of your expenses that need to be cleaned up will show up here. You’ll be able to easily fill in any data that’s missing.

You can also view your latest expenses in case you need to modify or check any information.

There’s two approaches that could work here:

Check things and clean things up on a regular basis, like once a week for example

Clean the data up right before you want to check out the reports, to make sure the data’s clean when you look at the graphs

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`Last Month`⁠
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Here’s the fun part!

From here, you can see the breakdown of your expenses for the last calendar month. Use the controls to isolate a specific tag or look at a specific time period of interest.

You’ll be able to answer questions like:

How much did I spend in total?

How much did I spend in each category?

Which days or weeks did I spend more than normal?

What were the big ticket items I bought last month?

And much more!

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`Reports`⁠
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🎉 Fun stuff, continued.

Slice up your historical expense data any way you like using the controls and graphs on this page!

Look beyond just the past month to whatever period of time you want

Filter by tag

See how your expenses have evolved from month to month

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That’s It!

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You’re all set up. Happy tracking! 🎉

FAQs

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How much does it cost to use this expense tracker?

The Doc itself is free to use!

To unlock all the features of this Document, you need:

Pro Coda account: $10/month

Mindee for Coda Pack: $2/month

Mindee account: Free up to 250 receipts per month, then $0.10/receipt

🎁 For the first month after launch, this Pack will be completely free for everybody!

Note for free Coda account users:

You’ll have full access to Mindee for Coda Pack for automatic receipt processing only during the Beta Trial period. After that, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid Coda account and pay for the Pack to continue using it.

However, you can still use this Coda Document for your expense tracking needs, since all other features will work perfectly.

You will have a 1,000 row limit on your Document

Are there any limitations to how many line items I can add?

Free Coda users have a size limit of 1,000 rows

Pro Coda users do not have any document size limits, but are limited to 500 processed receipts per month due to the automation limit

What kind of data can be extracted from my receipt?

The Mindee API is constantly being updated and improved.

At the moment, here’s the data that can be extracted from the Mindee API:

Total Amount: total purchase amount including taxes

Taxes: information about taxes

Amount: the tax amount

Rate: tax rate in percentage

Code: tax code if applicable (like VAT)

Purchase Date: local date of purchase

Purchase Time: local time of purchase

Vendor: name of the business where the purchase was made

Category: the category of the receipt. At the moment, only 7 predefined categories are supported:

toll

food

parking

transport

accommodation

gasoline

miscellaneous

Locale: information about where the purchase was made

Language: ISO 639-1 code. Works best with:

Country: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code. Works best with:

Currency: ISO 4217 code. At the moment, only 5 predefined currencies are supported:

CAD

CHF

GBP

EUR

USD

What receipt languages are supported?

Support for more languages is coming soon, but at the moment, the Mindee API works best for these languages:

Catalan

Dutch

English

French

German

Italian

Portuguese

Spanish

I’m having issues with connecting my Mindee account.

If you’re having issues with Mindee, please try connecting your account again using these steps:

Step 1: double check your Mindee account. Make sure you’ve added the Expense Receipts API! It should be listed under “Your APIs”

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Step 2: Click Settings Icon in the top right → search Mindee → click Mindee for Coda

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Step 3: Click Settings tab → click the 3 dots → click Sign in again

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If you’re still having issues, please

send me an email⁠

DM me on Twitter⁠

. Happy to help!

I have questions or need support, what do I do?

You can

chat with me on Twitter⁠

! My DMs are always open. Send me a message or leave a comment on a recent post.

A bit about me. Why did I create this doc?

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Hey there, I’m Denis. 👋

I’m a mechanical engineer turned creator, builder, and entrepreneur thanks to my discovery of no-code tools like Coda.

You can find me on

Twitter⁠

, where I share my learnings and struggles as I try to grow my own business.

My wife and I have been traveling around Asia for 4 months now, and since we’re living on a fairly tight budget given that both of us don’t have stable jobs, we track all of our expenses. We’ve been using a good old Google Sheet, but when I found out that I could create a Coda Pack to help simplify this process, I jumped at the opportunity.

The most important thing about tracking expenses is to just remember to do it, and from my own personal experience I’ve found that the simpler it is to do, the more likely I am to continue doing it. That’s why I thought this Pack and this Doc could be helpful to people like us.

I know some of you already use budgeting apps like Mint or business credit cards like Brex that do this for you, but those only really handle payments made by credit card. For other purchases made with cash, you have to go in and add the transaction yourself. Expensify does actually have this feature, but only offers 25 SmartScans per month.

So this is where Mindee comes in to the story. I used Mindee a bunch in my previous role as co-founder and Head of Ops at a startup. They have an awesome image recognition technology that can read things like passports, receipts, and invoices and extract data from them. I even trained custom models using their technology to read data from my custom document types! Pretty cool stuff.

I put 1 and 1 together, and realized that I could use Coda’s existing structure (which is already perfect for tracking expenses) with Mindee’s technology to extract info from receipts and throw it into a Coda Doc.

This Mindee for Coda Pack and this expense template document are the end result of that idea, and I hope they can help make tracking your expenses simpler, faster, and more automatic. Enjoy!

Want to connect? Best way to reach me is on Twitter. DMs always open.

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Connect on Twitter

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Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.

Simplified Expenses

Set Up Your Doc

How It Works

⁠Add an item⁠⁠

⁠Expenses⁠⁠

⁠Last Month⁠⁠

⁠Reports⁠⁠

That’s It!

FAQs

How much does it cost to use this expense tracker?

Are there any limitations to how many line items I can add?

What kind of data can be extracted from my receipt?

What receipt languages are supported?

I’m having issues with connecting my Mindee account.

I have questions or need support, what do I do?

A bit about me. Why did I create this doc?

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`Add an item`⁠
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`Expenses`⁠
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`Last Month`⁠
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`Reports`⁠
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