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It’s no secret that I’m an Evernote fanatic.  The reason is really simple. Because it integrates so well with many other applications that we all use, Evernote saves me from doing a lot of small but necessary tasks. This allows me to focus confidently on other more important things, which is a key to being more productive both personally and professionally. As author and financial advisor, Nathan W. Morris, has noted, “It’s not always that we need to do more but rather that we need to focus on less.”

In this post, I want to discuss how to automatically add entries to a Google Sheet for expenses you track in Evernote. This integration can save a ton of time and ensure that you get reimbursed for, or are able to easily deduct, your business expenses. So let me describe how this works.

1. easy expense tracking first requires that you have zapier, google, and evernote accounts

This integration depends on having a Zapier account, a Google account and an Evernote account.  In this post, I discuss the Zapier tool, which allows you to make connections between two or more of over 1,000 apps in order to automate tasks.  Among those 1,000 + apps are Evernote and Google Sheets, the two apps we are going to connect in order to automate the task of tracking your business expenses in a spreadsheet.

I’ve written before about the simple steps I use to keep track of my travel expenses in Evernote using my smart phone.  You can quickly take a photo of a restaurant or taxi receipt, for example, with the Evernote camera on your phone, make any other necessary notations, and move on, confident that you’ve captured the transaction (paperless) for later.

But when later arrives, you usually need to move what you’ve captured into a spreadsheet or upload it into tax or financial software to account properly for the expense. Evernote isn’t much help here.  But with a little bit of thought, you can set up your expense notes in Evernote so that they can be transferred to a Google Sheet quite efficiently with the help of Zapier.

2. connect your google and evernote accounts to zapier

The first step in getting to easy expense tracking is to connect your Google and Evernote Accounts to Zapier, a process that I discuss in detail here.  This is easy. Just go to “Connected Accounts,” find the apps you want to add, provide your login information, and you’re set.  In this case, you'd want to connect Google and Evernote to Zapier.

3. Identify the Notebook and the Note Fields Within Evernote That You Want to Transfer to Google Sheets

Within Evernote, you need to specify the particular fields from notes within a specific notebook that will be sent to Google Sheets.  I put all of my notes related to expenses in a single notebook called, not surprisingly, “Expenses.”  Within all of the notes that exist in the Expenses notebook, I use the following note fields to track expenses:

Tag: This is a tag for the business or organization to whom the expense is attributable;

Title:  I use the note title field to specify the nature of the expense; e.g., parking for funder meeting

Time Created: This is automatically created by Evernote and provides the date and time the note was created.

Amount: This is the only thing other than a photo of a receipt that I include in the body of the note.

Photo: An image taken with the Evernote camera in the body of the note. It could also be a receipt clipped from an email or from the Web with the Evernote Webclipper.

Here’s a diagram showing where to find the Evernote fields described above:

4. set up columns in a google sheet for each of the above note fields

To create the zap, you must set up a Google Sheet with specific columns, one for each field you want to bring over from Evernote.  Below, I’ve shown you my expense sheet and how the columns in the sheet correspond with the fields I’m bringing over from Evernote. (Note that the column headers don’t have to match the titles of the Note fields.  Note, also, that when the zap completes you have a hyperlink image of your receipt in the spreadsheet, which can be helpful if you have a funder or employer who makes you collect receipts in order to get reimbursed).

5. Set up the integration ("zap") between evernote and google sheets in zapier

After you’ve created your Google Sheet and noted how the Evernote fields correspond with your columns, you are ready to set up the Zap.

In Zapier, the “Trigger,” which is the first step in a Zapier automation, is easy.  Just specify the notebook where you’re keeping your expenses. Mine is called just that, “Expenses:”

The second step in setting up the "zap, called the Action, requires that you align the fields in Evernote with the columns in the sheet that you set up in Google Sheets. To do this, pick the correct Google Sheets Worksheet as shown below:

All that’s left is to tell Google Sheets what Evernote information goes in each column: 

And that’s all there is to easy expense tracking with Evernote, Zapier and Google Sheets.  Now, every time you capture a receipt in Evernote, you’ll automatically be adding that expense to Google Sheets.  For more on how to use Evernote to improve your personal and professional productivity (and, simultaneously, to save your sanity as a leader within a small nonprofit), check out these posts.