Your contractor emails four invoices at the end of the month. Each one has a dozen line items mixing labor and materials across roofing, siding, drywall and MEP. To get that into your project budget properly you have to open each PDF, retype every line, pick a category for each one, work out how the sales tax splits across items, upload the PDF as a receipt, and then link the receipt to the right transaction.
It takes the better part of an hour. So most investors do the fast version instead: one lump expense, category Repair Costs, receipt filed somewhere they will find later. The budget still balances, but the moment you want to know what roofing actually cost you compared to what you estimated, the detail is gone.
This automation does the slow version at the speed of the fast one.
You give your assistant the invoice files and tell it which property they belong to. From there it works the way a careful bookkeeper would.
It reads each invoice the way a person does, pulling out the vendor, the date, the invoice number and every individual line. It finds the matching project in your workspace by address. It uploads the original PDF and files it as a receipt, so the paper trail stays intact and you can always open the source document later.
Then it creates the expense and enters each line from the invoice separately, marking whether it was labor or materials and assigning it to the closest category your project has. It hands the sales tax to FlipperForce rather than working out the split itself, so the tax lands on each line in the correct proportion.
When it finishes, it gives you a summary of every invoice and a combined total to check against the paperwork in front of you.
What it will not do: this automation only adds new records. It does not edit or delete anything already in your project. Everything it creates appears in your Expense Tracker exactly like an expense you entered yourself, so you can review it, correct it, or remove it at any time.
I am attaching contractor invoices for my FlipperForce project at [PROPERTY ADDRESS].
For each invoice, please:
1. Upload the original PDF to the project as a receipt, using the vendor name and the invoice issue date
2. Create an expense transaction linked to that receipt
3. Itemize every line from the invoice as its own expense line item, preserving the description and amount exactly as written
4. Classify each line as labor or materials
5. Record the vendor name and invoice number on the transaction
6. Pass the sales tax as a transaction level total and let FlipperForce distribute it across the line items rather than allocating it yourself
7. Assign each line item to the most specific expense category available on the project
When you are done, give me a summary table of each invoice, its line item count, and its total, plus a combined total I can check against the invoices. Flag anything you were unsure about rather than guessing.
ChatGPT: the receipt upload uses a three stage flow that requires computing a file checksum before uploading. This is the workflow most affected by ongoing spec corrections, so we are verifying it thoroughly before publishing ChatGPT setup instructions.
Zapier: not a good fit. Reading an unstructured PDF and deciding how to itemize it requires judgment, which is what makes this an AI automation rather than a trigger and action one.
This prompt requires a connection to the FlipperForce Public API. Once your AI agent is connected to your account, you can run any prompt in the library.
Learn how to connect your AI agent to the FlipperForce Public API
Before running this automation, open the project in FlipperForce and load a Repair Estimator template. Until you do, the project only has six top level categories and every line item will land in Repair Costs.
This is the one manual step in an otherwise hands off workflow. Categories cannot currently be created through the API, so the buckets have to exist before the agent can file anything into them.
If you have already run it and then loaded a template, you do not need to start over. Ask your assistant to remap the existing line items to the new categories and it will update them in place, leaving your totals unchanged.
Always compare the combined total against your invoices before you consider the batch closed. The reconciliation summary exists so you have a number to check, not so you can skip checking.