#Onam, the official harvest festival of #Kerala, India, also marks the Malayali New Year. As an expat, organizing a celebration for over 100 people, while the feast and logistics are manageable, tracking expenses can quickly become chaotic. Receipts start pouring in from various people, shops, and categories. Questions arise immediately: "Who paid for the hall?" "How much have we spent on food?" "Can you send me that invoice?" To streamline this process, I developed a simple system where team members can upload receipts, add their names and categories in just 30 seconds. Once uploaded, the receipt is stored, AI reads and extracts line items, and everything is recorded in a database. A live dashboard updates automatically, showing spend by category, budget status, and direct links to the original invoices. This system provides clean data without the need for chasing updates or confusion over which version of the sheet is the latest. #TheBiggerPicture The underlying pattern is intriguing. This is not merely an event expense tracker; it’s a receipt-to-database pipeline with a live reporting layer. The Onam event serves as the context, but this architecture is applicable to any business with distributed spending-whether it’s field teams logging site expenses, franchise operators tracking outlet-level costs, or logistics companies capturing vendor invoices on the go. When it’s time to enhance the system-adding authentication, role-based access, approval workflows, reimbursement tracking, and multi-project support-the foundation is already established, allowing for extensions rather than a complete rebuild. This system was built over a weekend using #Nextjs, n8n, Supabase, #Codex, #GoogleDrive, and #Vercel