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finance

Monthly Budget Alert System

Monitor actual spending against monthly budgets tracked in Google Sheets. Sends Slack alerts when spending approaches the limit and email summaries to stakeholders.

Intermediate~20 minn8nMake.com 94 downloads 197 views

Setup Instructions

1. Create a Google Sheets spreadsheet named "Monthly Budget" with columns: Department, Budget, Spent, Remaining, Percentage Used. 2. Populate each row with department names and their monthly budget allocations. Use formulas for Remaining (=Budget-Spent) and Percentage (=Spent/Budget). 3. In your automation platform, set up a Schedule trigger to run daily at 9 AM (or your preferred time). 4. Add a Google Sheets node to read all rows from the budget sheet. 5. Add a Filter/IF node to identify departments where Percentage Used exceeds 80%. 6. For departments over threshold, add a Slack node to post a warning to #finance with the department name, budget, and amount spent. 7. Add a Gmail node to send a weekly summary email to finance stakeholders listing all departments and their budget status. 8. Test by setting a department's Spent value above 80% of its Budget and running the workflow manually.
Troubleshooting
**Schedule trigger not firing:** Verify your automation platform's server timezone matches your expected trigger time. Cron expressions use UTC by default in most platforms. **Google Sheets returning empty data:** Ensure the sheet name in the node matches exactly (case-sensitive). Check that the range covers all data rows including headers. **Slack messages sent for every department:** Double-check the filter condition — it should be "greater than 0.8" (not 80) if the percentage is stored as a decimal. Adjust based on your sheet's number format. **Email summary missing departments:** If using a loop, ensure the aggregation collects all filtered results before composing the email body. Some platforms require an explicit Aggregate node.

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