Manus to enter receipt items in a household budget

kimura wanted to stop typing individual receipt items into a household account book. After building a similar process with Google Workspace Studio, the author recreated it in Manus: place a new receipt in a designated Google Drive folder, then have the agent read it and write the items into a spreadsheet.

The setup used read-only Drive access and spreadsheet writing permissions. Rather than designing a chain of separate steps, kimura supplied the reading instructions and destination sheet and let Manus organize the work.

The test used 13 actual July shopping receipts containing 58 items, from several kinds of stores. All items were entered. When kimura compared each receipt's paid total against the sheet, 12 matched within one yen. The remaining discrepancy involved a discount sticker. Manus also handled tax-exclusive supermarket prices as tax-inclusive item amounts.

The automation was imperfect. The first receipt did not trigger and needed a manual request. A batch of 12 stopped partway through, while individual receipts completed in about two minutes after starting. There was roughly a ten-minute trigger delay, and store or cashier names could be misread. The useful result was itemized household data with a clear reconciliation check, rather than an assumption that successful entry meant flawless reading.

Prompt
Suggested prompt (written by Agents In Use, not the author's)

Source: note.com · kimura