notion can be a really powerful tool to stay on top of your finances both in your personal and your professional life but there's usually one big hurdle getting the data into notion I mean who really has the time to sit down and input all of their expenses into notion luckily you can easily automate the whole process so in this video I'll show you how to build a fully automated Finance tracker in no here's a little preview it's a simple but really effective overview that will show you your most recent expenses uh your Current financial status for the month right so how much you spent and how much you uh made and then some nice insights into you know okay how much do you spend uh over certain categories or how is your month by month breakdown in terms of finances looking like and again everything fully automated you won't have to you know do a single data input in order for this to populate in your notion workspace in order to build this yourself we first need to set up your databases for this setup you want to have three databases one for your cash flow items a second one for the individual months and then third one for the years and will become very clear why we need the later two in a second so let's type slash database and create first our cash flow uh items and here uh the properties that we need for sure are of course uh the uh amount so we need a number property called amount and we can just call this uh add like you know change it to US dollar or whatever currency you use then we want another property for the date right uh when that transaction happened and last last but least we need um a select property in order to determine whether this is an inflow or an outflow uh so let's just call this type and then as options uh at inflow and outflow and the reason we want to have this here in one database and not in several databases is because if you plan on using the new notion charts it's much better to have uh all the information in one in the same database that makes it much easier to visualize than you know the rate for example of inflow versus outflow um um and that's pretty much the reason for that if not you could of course also split this into two databases but overall this is uh just a nice and scalable setup now you can add to this of course more complexity for example we could add uh now another Select Property and call this category so you want to break down our spending into different uh types of spins we could uh do that so it's call this five number uh groceries um and um travel uh and dining out right in case this is a private um uh tracker in case of course it's a business P tracker you might want to uh add categories for your different departments in the team next up let's add our next database uh and this will be the database for the months so great this here and this one is much much simpler we can just uh for now at least uh we can delete the existing property and then we just need a relation of the month to our different cash flow items and going to show it on both sides and we can just call this yeah items here and then month uh on the other side and then will allow us to group uh our Elements by a different month so we can just quickly go in here and actually swap outed icon or a calendar icon and here the item one we can swap that uh for um let's just take the uh list um and can out different line items and now all right let's say okay we have here September uh October and November uh and that means now let's say we have just to give an example right let's say we have here um oping at Costco we have uh coffee and we have uh know ice cream uh and some random ones so let's say $55 uh $5 and uh $30 on ice cream was a lot of ice cream uh what we can do now is we can uh Set uh the month and later this will all happen automatically right it's just now to to show you the reason why we set up databases that way and we can set a uh um at category so let's say groceries here and then both of both coffee and ice cream that um was both uh during a travel and what we can now do is create some aggregation here on this to see at a glance how much we spend across the board so first let's stop ring this and then let's create a new formula property here this formula property uh first what what we want is like of course our total spend so let's let's call this total uh spend and uh spend uh and then uh we can use an arrow right to indicate okay this is uh the money that goes out and on top of the formula what we want to do is you want to say okay give me the items then filter them uh you want to filter them where the um current um and then the uh category sorry the type is equal to uh an outflow right because if we have later like inflows and outflows in there we only want to uh catch the one that outflows and then uh after that we need to um map and get the uh current amount and last but not least we need to summon this now if this is a bit complicated don't worry you can always pause the video just type it down or you can check out the blog poting in description where you have all these formulas to copy paste so let's click done uh now this should show nothing because currently we haven't set uh our uh types here so let's just set outflow on all of these and now we have our sum of 90 just need to adapt it and make also sure that here our number format is also a Us doll and we see okay across the board we spend currently $90 in September and now since we can then for the next month right map a different month we'll have then this overview of how much we spend each month H each month overall and we can also create category breakdowns in order to do that uh let's uh just duplicate this uh for our general setup and let's call cause call this um you know growth travel uh as one example there we have several expenses let's take the the plane uh as an icon and now what we want to do before we uh you know sum everything up we want to uh you know filter a second time so there are two ways to do it we can just tap on another filter or we can U mod modify this filter with and so let's actually do that so we'll put uh you know and uh in the uh brackets and that means we can add a second condition and we'll say so for one it should be outlow and then for two the uh current dot um uh what is it category uh should be equal to uh travel and now if we click on then this should reduce accordingly to 35 yes 5 + 30 perfect and now what you could do is of course just duplicate this property for whatever category you have and all you need to do in the formula is swap out where it say travel right for whatever other categories you have nearly done uh one last database but this one is super simple here uh let's create now our database for the year just because we probably want to see our spend you know year over year and uh in this one uh all we need is the name and then we need a relation to um our different months so again show months show the year and uh in this case month gets again you know our calendar uh we can now map these to that so so let's say okay we currently have 20 24 and then we need 25 as well uh not need to go further for now and then we map this here to uh 2024 and now we can do the same uh thing here on the year that we did on the month right we can create an aggregation so we can again say okay give me a formula property you know total uh spend and here again write a very similar formula right so uh we take our months then we want to filter our months and we want to make sure the um actually we don't need to do the filter we can uh just just realize because we take just the whole spend so what we can just simply do is say okay from months uh please map the current uh do total spent and then just give me uh the sum of that all right click on okay and of course in this case it's still 19 right because we don't have any spent for any other months but if we had any other months uh we would now get the aggregated spend across everything we could then break it further down right again into like the different categories if you want to but I think this is a good starting point for the database backend for our fully automated Finance tracker in l one quick note you can download the whole setup as the finished template plus a bunch of additional notion templates all on my website link for that is in the description on there you'll find also a ton of tutorials to learn more about notion and to really push the limits so definitely go check that one out next up a quick step with Google Drive in Google Drive we basically want a location where we can have two folders one folder for all our income and one folder for all of our expenses now if you are use this for a private use case and you work a regular job where you simply get a pay slip and it's the same amount every month then you can skip the part with income in that case I'll show you in a second where you can just like set up a recurring income in notion but if your income fluctuates maybe because you know you are a business or you track your business uh income in here and you you know write invoices and you need to have them track or you're a freelancer so you have a varying income for that you can also use this to automatically extract the inflows so in that case we want to have two folders right one for uh inflows uh and another one for um oops uh for our upls and that's pretty much everything we need to set up uh here just quickly as promised how would you set up you know your recurring uh inflow all the time well the easiest way to do that is to set up a new template here on your database and say you know like a uh B lip uh whatever you know source of income you have say okay let's say we earn $5,000 a month the type very important would be inflow and the date uh we can say okay please do the today date when duplicated and then what we can do is you can say Okay um let's make this template uh this pce slip uh recurring so let's say make this repeat and let's repeat this you know monthly uh or weekly depending on how many you get paid say so every month we want to create this uh and then we can save it and that means now every month we will get a new entry of our P slip here and then once it is in there um just show you as an example so pay slip uh we can just fly this template we'll see we have now a new uh inflow that has automatically this date associated with it doesn't have the month right that we either need to do um manually or we can build a separate automation for that but other than that it's already in there and then we can of course uh expand our um you know calculations here and say okay uh let's duplicate our total spend uh and let's call this our total income again if your income is fixed and you don't care about this you can skip that if your income is variable and you care about okay how much did you make every month you probably want to have this and the only thing we need to SW swap uh swap out here is uh you know uh outflow to inflow and that will give us uh our total income and then we could of course have uh also our uh another formula property for our result particular relevant if this is for business use case where we say Okay total income um minus uh total spent uh and then also have this show um as dollar so we have a live updating overview over the you know month of how we standing with this ready we can move on to the automation that will automatically extract all our income and expenses and add it to notion the automation tool that we're going to use today is called relay. app and they're one of my favorite new and very recent finds in the whole automation R they are great because they have a very very easy to ous interface they have a very strong integration with AI in a very useful way and it's overall a lower learning curve with relay. app compared to make.com make.com is the usual automation tool that I use for most of my client workflows but in particular if you're newer to automations uh this is much easier so that's why I'm going to show it to you uh with relay but of course you could just as well use make.com to build this all right so this is how it looks like when you sign up for Rel ah and one thing I forgot they also have an amazing free plan another reason to do a tutorial with them because you can build all of this for yourself for free anyway this is how it looks like when you sign for up although you probably won't see any workflows uh because your workplace will be empty but what you want to do is you want to click on new workflow and then the first thing we can do is we can title this so let's called this uh automated uh Finance tractor um outflows right and then uh if you wanted to uh have an icon right the money that you spend you can add that uh to it next we need to define the trigger and the trigger basically means when should this automation start now what we want to have is that we want whenever we add uh another uh you know expense to our expense folder in Google Drive we want this automation to extract that information and add it to a notion so what we going to do is we say okay please Google Drive Whenever there is a file added to a folder uh now if you have not used uh Google drive with relay app before it will walk you through the flow to authorize it and once you've done you can now here select the folder so my folder will be um the expense folder if I recall it correctly or outow and then you should add ideally um an expense to it or PDF so we have S some s data I did that right I my Whimsical invoice for August in September uh we can preview it here and it just like pulls that data in so with that done we can click on done and that is now the first step of our automation all we're going to use AI to extract the information from the document and it could be a PDF it could be an image right whatever you get uh to document your uh spin you can put it there now the method that I'm going to show you first works best for individual invoices so probably better in a business uh uh use case where you have you know individual invoices for all your expenses for more of a private use case where you might have you know bank statement or a credit card statement uh we need to slightly expand this automation I'm going to show you how that works in a second but let's first focus on this much simpler use case where you have one invoice for one expense in that case what we want to do is you want to click on a stap and you want to say please give me the AI and I want to write a custom prompt now a custom prompt uh will be that to tell you are a personal finance assistant uh it is your job to take a look at the attached document and extract the most relevant information for our finance tracker please extract the um the the purpose of the invo right like the like the the product B uh that product B and brackets name the amount and the date of the purchase perfect very simple PR you're going to of course you know adapt it if you want to extract more information but this gives us a great starting point now again the reason why relay is so good with that is because it makes it really easy to uh get these more advanced AI workflows without knowing too much of how it actually works behind it so all we need to do is now under additional context go in here and say okay please uh attach the pile that we get in step one to it so that we have prompt together with the file we don't need to search Google or access any websites but what we want to do is we want to define the output and this again makes makes it much much easier for example if you use this uh with make then what you would need to do here now is to Define exactly okay please uh output this in adjacent output you know these field so you would need to write it in the prompt here what we can do is we can simply go in and say okay please give me first text field this will be the name then gave me uh give me a number field this will be the amount and last but not least uh please give me a date feied so under more types we can take uh date and this will be um the uh did we call it transaction date um let's just call this date should be uh should work but you want to make sure that if you have like more complex uh prompts and want to extract something specific you should match uh or like at least explain here in your prompt uh what should be filled um in here all right if the model returns an error we will fail and then what all we need to do is we can click on test the step select our file from uh the Whimsical invoice we have our Whimsical uh invoice uh perfect August September and then we can click uh on test to see whether it extracts the data the way we think it should all right and after a few seconds we see the automation has been completed successfully and we see okay date 28th August name monthly plan amount 12 perfect now one thing that we see though as like monthly plan right we can't F out from this like what monthly plan so we should expand our prompt a little bit and say so we want a product bought um name and uh company uh so that also adds you know Whimsical in there on like pay so we we know that and then the amount but so we don't need to test it again so we can just click onone and continue with the next step all right we want to now create a new entry in notion so we click on plus and we will select notion from our connections and say add a page to a database now again if you use notion for the first time with relay you will have to go through the authorization process and connect it ons and during this connection step it will ask you what pages of databases should it have access to and in that case ideally you already give it xess to that database with the cash flow items but if you forgot that or you have already used relay and now need to connect this then you need to go over to norn and make sure that Relay can access that specific database in order to do that you can simply navigate to the parent page in which all your databases live and click on the three dots in the top right corner under connections you want to make sure that relay app shows if it doesn't show go on connect to and search for relay and here you'll be able to connect it if you authorized relay already for your notion backage I can now go into my database and say please uh give me my cash flow items and on cash flow items I can now choose which Fields populate so I can say please map the uh our name field um here on our our database please map this to on plus the AI output for the name then please snap the uh date for uh again our um uh AI output for the date and um last but least please map the amount uh you already know not drill to the AI output from the mountfield that's the very basic setup where we just now push over the uh entries from um the extracted uh PDF or image to no and that would be a great starting point but we probably also want to automate the part where it has to you know select the corresponding one so let's add that quickly in in order to do this we need to add two steps to our mod we need to First figure out what month uh a transaction happened in and then we need to search that month as a database item in our you know month database in no now we could actually just expand our prop and ask uh you know chat or whatever AI model we use uh please um also output theand and then map it to a field and then use that but let's learn a little bit about relay and how it works so instead what we're going to do is we're going to use um a data transform so under utilities we want to transform data and we want to say please take the AI output of the date and uh transform this now what we want to do is we want to make sure that we uh format uh this as text and we want to format it as um the actual mod so we can scroll down until we see okay we want to scoll format this month at this date as the January option and we can click uh on now that's the first step and then the second step is we want to search that month in no so let's go in and let's say okay uh not we want to use the uh find pages of we want to search in our months database and the filter by which we want to search we want to make sure that the name of that month is exactly the um transformed data text output so and then we can also like say okay what should happen if nothing is you know found uh nothing is found uh please uh still continue or fail or in this case let's say let's fail and if more than one page is found uh pick the first one now as you might know F figure like this can of course start to fail once you have your next year and the next uh um you know months with the same name there are few ways to troubleshoot this the easiest is to Simply when you go to the next uh year add like a filter here that you always do that for the current year but let's keep it simple for now and just pretend we only have every month once in here we have our Journal structure ready so we can actually start a test run and just see that this actually works as intended so let's click on start a test run we can uh pick a file to test it with and click on test run this will open this other module where we can uh have it run all steps and now we can see hopefully in real time how it will extract the information using chbt then transform the data and then hopefully find the month where the day was August and actually throw an error okay so now we can uh do some troubleshooting and we can see why did this automation P okay error from no dequest to integration uh timed out okay so this is actually a fairly common error that you might run into when you build an automation so it's great that we have it here that's because the notion uh API uh rate limits uh how many requests can do and sometimes times that me just means you know when you send too many requests at once uh it will uh time out now here we actually only send two requests so it's probably more because the notion API is a bit under heavy load so what we can do in this case just to be on the safe side we can add a delay or sleep in here so let's look for Sleep uh or actually delay is it that no always forget how it's called is it on a flow control yeah wait for time it's called okay let's say we want to wait for um uh you know one minute before we uh run uh The Next Step that would fix it particular if you have a lot of requests know notion uh API is overloaded doesn't happen then we just need to rerun the automation but let's uh do it with this uh publish and upgrade the active run uh publish and then uh let's go back uh and start uh another test run all right all right this is looking better the run is complete and if we head over to uh our norn uh database we see we have now the monthly plan with go we have $12 uh here and we have the 28th of August and it connected it to August I did create August of course before I did that so that it could find that month right if you wanted to create a month in case it doesn't find it that would expand the complexity a little bit but that's just one last thing that we need to change for sure we need to make sure this is uh labeled as an outflow so let's go back to the workflow let's um update it and make sure that when we add a page to our cash flow items we also uh as one more field set the type always to um h but that doesn't change across tabs that's always the same so this is now your base template to extract uh all the expenses that you will have where you have an individual invoice find and you can of course easily adapt this to on the other hand extract your inflow if you have varying inflows same process right you would upload it to the different folder you would duplicate this whole Automation and you just make sure that it looks at the file in the out inflow order uh folder and when it creates a new page item it labels it as inflow other than outflow but what about if you have for example a credit card statement and you need to extract you know a lot of line items from it well bit more complicated but it's also possible in order to do this let's actually take this workflow uh duplicate it uh and then modify it accordingly so this one will be you know our uh automated uh Finance tracker outflows or line items and the typical use cases right you have a credit card statement and you have um a lot of individual things and you don't want to just have the sum but what you actually spend things on so in this case what you need to do is you need to modify your prompt and we need to ask it not to only you know extract like a sum but we need to ask it to uh create a Json object and an array of all these individual Elements which might sound complicated but don't worry again this will make it uh super simple so your job is to take a look at the attached uh you know let's just call this a credit card statement because what we assume we'll put in there PR card statement uh and extract um uh uh extract every single line item um for every line item please provide the uh name what uh was what the amount and the date uh of the and action output uh result in uh JC uh object and then we need to redefine our output so we're actually going to remove uh these elements here and instead what we wanted to do is under more types we want it to give us a Json array and this array will be an array of Json objects bit complicated but again don't worry uh this will uh make sense in a moment so let's call this um our line items uh save it and then in here we can now Define the nested structure so what are the elements for each individual item in that list and that would be again right uh the name it would be um the uh number so it would be the front and it would be last but not least um the uh date all right perfect so this is the modification that we need to make uh on the AI font level and this would then give us the um the desire output of having like all the individual items extracted now very importantly um if you have have a mixed situation right where you have some uh you know line items and some individual invoices you the easiest way to do this would to have just different folders for that right so and then different automations one that looks at the individual outflow one or the other of course you could make this automation more complex and first determine okay which one of the two is it but uh it's much much easier to do that you know sorting step manually and just upload your credit card statements to one F and your you know individual invoices to another next after we extract uh this list we need to make sure that we iterate over the list so we process every single line item separately in order to do that we need to click on plus here and then we need to uh go under flow control and there we have an iterator and here you see that we can now select uh a list so we can select our aiut and our line items from before and one important limitation currently with a related app you can only have 100 iterations per R so if your credit card statement has more than 100 individual line items you need to you know again add a bit more complexity to this you might have to split the array into several arrays uh there a lot of workarounds to it but uh let's focus on the the base version here um just to get this up and running and now as you can see we have uh inside our iterator can now Define uh different steps for it uh to go through so we need to make sure that we transform the data find the MTH wait and add the PTI the page to the cash flow items uh for every single item here so all we need to do is we just drag it inside so we say please transform data please uh find the page have this in different order uh and then last but least the uh add the Pats that didn't work with the resorting so let's try it this way can we grab it here perfect transform data in page at page and of course we have alerts on all of them because we need to uh you know remap the data so instead of taking this date we need to have the Json data date uh for finding the page um we will still um say okay please find exactly from the transform later the text element that works and then last but not least uh under the cash flow items we need to make sure it's not the general cash flow sorry cash flow item is correct but here we need to then go in and swap out the always for the Json data so this would be the name the date would be uh the date uh in the um Json uh data and then the amount would be also the amount from that CH data perfect that's pretty much it oops Got save time uh date save and then everything should be correct oh let's see uh yeah we need to also authorize an otion sometimes it asks you to reauthorize a different tool um because uh your permissions are set to account so we just click on authorize a b them and then uh perfect uh now we should be oops able to then confirm everything and we can test this workflow as well as last time we click on start test run uh we can then again look for our files so we have a sample CR card statement we create a test run and again we'll go through it to see whether jbt can correctly extract data and then iterate through all of our elements here right and we see now the iterations are currently running right for every single iteration uh it will go now through patch the data from noron we actually forgot to add the weight part so should make sure to fix that but will grab every single element and hopefully add it correctly to our database perfect so we have all our sample credit card expenses in here now and of course uh our months automatically calculat us right our total spend uh across them and if we had categories on them that we would uh you know categorize accordingly also the breakdown here now I did say fully automated and there's still One manual step that we have to do in our current setup and that's to apply a category to it now it might of course be a good idea to you know go through your items and apply these categories yourself just to be sure you know you're uh very specific with them and actually realize okay what you're spending your money on but in case you also want to automate it with the help of AI well you can so for this one what we need to do is first start this trigger uh with notion and we want to make sure that a new page is added so we basically trigger this of anything being added to our database and we'll pick of course our cash flow items database uh we could add a filter to it and we actually should because we probably want to you know also look at the uh ones where the type um is an outflow and then as will uh in a second like pull all our uh example uh credit card statements in here so perfect we can click uh on done here that's the trigger and then the action that we want to take is again an AI action and we want it to look at our expense right and tell us okay what was this expense about so in this case we'll ask it you know uh please look at the um uh blah blah uh look at the uh expense uh provided and identify the best category to categorize it within uh our finance TR now very simple prompt you can of course expand that uh a good idea would be to give it some guard rates and to make sure that it only selects some certain categories because otherwise you risk it keeps labeling things differently so what I would recommend the easiest solution is to just in here write your categories that you want to have labeled right so let's say we want to uh have like uh know categories to uh choose from and that could be um uh travel uh groceries subscript options and um other uh if no specific category applies these shoes now of course you can make this uh even more robust right you can could have a database of your categories in notion pull that in dynamically to have it choose from it and so on and so on but this is a very good starting point and of course and another tip for your prompt writing if you do this for business right and you want to label it for that uh adding more uh context around you know your specific situation of course also helps it to uh be more precis the context that we want to put in uh will be um from the page um the uh name um and that should be pretty much actually it uh and then we can just have it um uh as an output uh put uh render some text and this should be the uh category perfect now with this category saved uh we can then go to the next step and say okay please now uh in notion um update page so please update the page that we had uh from the def in the first step and please update the category field and set the category to uh our uh a output so you get a one here right it will uh tell you that okay if this is the wrong type uh it might uh result in an error but uh for this case notion will accept uh the text version so uh that should be fine and now let's just uh start a test run again to see whether it works properly so we have here just our sample credit card expenses here of course it won't be able to you know pick the specific category but it should actually just tell it uh say then that it is uh an other expense so let's see where it works all right this looks good and if we move over here we see okay sample credit card expense uh it has now correctly been identified as other now all that's left is to build a finance dashboard in notion so in order to do that we will first turn all our databases into to Pages that's usually what I like to do while building I like to have them as inline option so it's just easier to you know jump between them but then when it's time to build a dashboard best to have them in their separate pages and move them in the backet so for cash flow items I'll probably uh we had the list item for the month uh we have the calendar with specific one and then for the year probably just take the um big calendar perfect then we can save to and call this back end and move our pages in there of course if you have your own uh prop back and set up in your notion worksspace where all your central databases live then you should move them there next let's get a bit more space and turn on full width on the page perfect now it's time to think about okay what are the most important things that we need to see when we open this page so what I would like to see is I would like to see my last uh 10 expenses and then um the current state of the month so do that I will type slash call and actually let's do 3ix up here so let's do here um our uh quick uh H2 for last expenses um here um H2 for um you know uh current um Finance uh status and then um like another one for let's call this analytics or something like that and of course if you have a smaller screen right you might want to stick with two um columns but I have quite a bit of screen re estate to work with here so I like this uh three column layout watch let's add a divider below them just for some nice visual uh parts uh on there and then let's uh add uh our lists so actually here on the last expenses uh let's uh do create link view database and we want to add our cash flow items uh let's take this as a table view that's perfect and then what I want to do is I want to first uh add a load limit so I only see 10 pages then I want to add a sort and I want to sort this by the date and I want to sort it by date descending so this makes sure now that I only see the last the newest 10 items I can then hide my database title just for cleaner VI and to make it even cleaner I can go in here and just add a space as the view name and then the icon for it and this creates this really really nice uh minimal layout here now uh in order to see actually just the relevant amount uh info I will resize these coms a little bit the date uh is great that's super useful and then I will hide all the properties I don't need so I go into properties and I want to hide the um actually the let's hide the type and the month um the category I want to see because I might want to be able to assign it so I'll actually make this a bit smaller uh and then that way we have more space to actually you know um apply the categories here and all still fits uh on this screen perfect um that looks pretty good so now let's uh go to The Current financial sets so here again we will uh say create link view of database and this time we want to pick our months now for months let's choose a different way to display this uh we could of course use this right with a table um but in particular if you only want to show one month it's a bit of Overkill and it's hard to fit all the information here so instead what we're going to do is we create we will create some helper properties uh and these help properties will just help us to uh uh make sense of the data that we're displaying you'll see in a moment why so let's call this uh display uh total spent and all I wanted to say is um total spent uh and then um I would also like this to be bold so I'm going add style and then in the St bracket I will just add a b to it which make the whole thing all both and you see uh in a uh table view like this not very useful but it will make sense in a second so we have uh this and then uh I want to see uh maybe also um my uh total income sure so uh let's take our duplicated property here and just let's call this total income and actually in order to make this a bit more colorful let's uh have our income in uh in uh green uh and our um uh spent uh in red perfect now what we can do is we can go in here and say okay layout please show this to me as a gallery and I don't want to show the database title I don't want to show uh a page view I just want to have the individual card and you might already see where I'm going at here uh I will change again this to the minimal uh look and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on as the properties the total spend loops and this one we actually need to rename to Total uh income and then we turn both of these on and then we turn our actual income and spend on and drag these numbers below and now you see why I have these divider properties because otherwise we just see the number here and it's very hard to make sense of the number to see well is this uh income or not uh all right but like this it's much better and then all we need to do is make sure we uh only show a current month so for that we have a few options where we can do it dynamically let's put this one just actually use a very simple filter um we want to have the uh say just okay please just show me um as the month uh currently uh what is it it's September uh that's all I want to see but of course uh if if you set up a smart filter you just set the date uh that the month lasts for and then um have it filter for the current month but again this does the trick here oops let's put this back all right this is taking up uh shape nicely all that's missing is now some analytics for analytics let's go ahead and create um another link datab View and now I want to have my expenses so we going take my cash flow items again uh create a new view and this time let's add a chart so we don't want to show a title here and then let's say edit chart and uh what I want to show is I want to show first a breakdown of like the categories that I spend on so I will show the category that's perfect but then what to show I don't want to show the count I want to show the uh sum of the individual aspects and we can see okay most of the categories we currently have not categorized but it's also because we can't show both expenses Al inflow and outflow so what we need to do is add a filter to this and say okay only show me things where the the um type uh is uh outflow and of course we could also filter for the current month so we say okay and um the month is September again if we do it like this we need to update it then uh on the individual months to update for the current month but if you have a date behind the month you can also just say Okay wherever this is the the current one perfect so now I see other glance okay this is how I spend across the categories and then let's call this uh by category and then let's create actually a second charge and for this one we just want to see maybe our month over month expenses so uh let's um duplicate this view call this month uh over month and here what we want to show is we want to show the month um we want to uh make sure that we don't show any months that don't have anything and then within the month I want to show the um sum of what we uh spend uh in each month now uh this again show is still fil up for September right so we need to actually go in here and um remove that filter fil there remove it perfect so now we have our different months they are in the wrong order so we need to go uh sort and make sure we don't sort uh A to Z but manually so we want have July August September perfect and then if we wanted to we could then further say okay please break it down by categories so under group we we pick category um and then we now have the individual um categories broken down we see okay no categories because in July and August we didn't assign categories but for September we see okay groceries travels this is how it Stacks up all right perfect this is looking already pretty good for a simple Financial dashboard that shows you pretty much everything you need at a glance but since I promised you this would be fully alterated let's now also build this thing where you know the months update automatically so in order to do that let's go first uh to our um month and make sure that they have actually a date property so we will uh add a date and we will call this um duration and then for every month we will set um actually when this month is so let's should do it for now just for September but you would of course do it for every single one and you in order to automate fully can automate also the month creation but for now let's just uh do this manually here for uh this one then we can go back to our finance tracker and can go to cash flow items and on cash flow items we can now pull in the actual duration via a roller so we can say okay please show me uh the um month duration and since this is a helper property that we actually don't really need for um this right it just poers some other features I often like to add helper in front of it and give them uh this generic um uh gear sign just as a visual way to you know separate them from other properties that actually do something if you work in a team environment great idea also to add a property description to make sure your team isn't confused by what the purpose of this properties and we want to pull in from the month um the uh duration perfect so now we automatically have the corresponding uh duration here which means oops that was duplicated we don't want that we want to hide this actually here um hide in you but now what we can do is we can go back here to our filters and adjust them to be automated so what we will do is say okay here for the filter instead of it's saying you know name September let's uh delete that uh and say instead okay I want it where the duration start dat is relative to um this month which shows me September and then next month will automatically show me uh October and then the same here right same idea um not on month or month but on the by category one we go Al also in the filter here is filter two rules um where the um not month but helper month duration any relative to the day is this month and you see exactly the same result as before but now as the month roll over this will automatically uh update and there you have it a fully automated Finance tracker in notion which happens to be a great use case for one of Notions most recent feature releases notion charts but there also a lot of additional amazing use cases for this feature so if you want to make the most out of notion charts and learn everything there is about visualizing stuff in your notion workspace well then just click here and I'll see 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