Our HOA Treasurer Was About to Quit Until I Helped Her 🙏

Neighbor runs our HOA. Volunteer position. Nobody else wants it. She was ready to quit.

The problem: expense receipts from 8 different board members. Pool maintenance, landscaping, repairs, supplies. All submitted differently. Some email photos. Some drop off paper. Some text her.

THE MONTHLY NIGHTMARE

End of month arrives. She spends entire Saturday sorting receipts. Which ones are pool related? Which are landscaping? Did someone already submit this one?

Manual spreadsheet entry for each receipt. Store name, amount, date, category, which budget line item. Takes 4-6 hours depending on how messy the month was.

Then someone questions an expense at the meeting and she can't find the original receipt fast enough.

She's 68. Volunteers her time. This wasn't fun anymore.

THE HELPER I BUILT

She texts or emails receipt photos to a dedicated address. Workflow processes automatically.

Extracts store name, date, amount, individual items when visible. Auto-categorizes based on merchant. Home Depot goes to maintenance. Pool supply store goes to pool. Landscaping company goes to grounds.

Everything logs to a shared spreadsheet with receipt image linked. Board members can see their own submissions.

Over threshold amounts flag for her approval before logging.

Monthly summary generates automatically. Total by category, comparison to budget, running annual totals.

THE CHANGE

Before: 4-6 hours monthly wrestling with receipts, dreading board meetings, considering quitting.

After: 20 minutes reviewing flagged items, confident at meetings with instant search, actually enjoying the volunteer role again.

She hugged me when I showed her it working.

The categorization isn't perfect. Sometimes Amazon gets miscategorized because could be anything. But 85% accuracy on auto-categorize is better than 100% manual entry.

Workflow here and all workflows i want to share

Anyone else helping volunteers or community groups with automation? They have the same problems as businesses but zero budget.

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