Meet Penny ‘the AI bill filer’

Every business gets bills. Nobody wants to file them.

They arrive as supplier emails, PDFs, and photos of receipts fished out of a glovebox. Someone opens each one, reads the total and the GST, works out which expense account it belongs to, checks it isn’t the reminder for a bill already paid, and puts the original somewhere the accountant can find it in July. That someone is usually you, at 9pm — or a bookkeeper billing by the hour to do it for you.

Penny does that job. Every bill your business gets — opened, read, coded and filed — by someone who loves the work. Think of her as the first hire in your finance division: works 24/7, never on leave, and costs about half a cent a document to run.

What Penny actually does

• Reads the document. Supplier, total, GST, date, currency — from an emailed PDF, a phone photo, or a file dropped into chat.
• Codes it to your chart of accounts. Export it from Xero (Accounting → Advanced → Chart of accounts → Export), drop the CSV into the chat, and from then on every bill lands on your accounts, not generic ones.
• Catches duplicates. The reminder, the statement, the payment receipt for a bill already filed — flagged as a duplicate, never double-entered.
• Files the original as evidence, linked from the record, where your bookkeeper can find it in one click.
• Handles foreign currency. Anything not in your base currency is converted at the official European Central Bank rate on the transaction date. The register keeps the original amount, the rate used, and the converted total.
• Answers questions. “How much did we spend this month?” “Biggest suppliers this quarter?” “Compare this financial year to last.” Exact totals, GST, top suppliers and biggest movers — computed from your register, not guessed.
• Learns from you. If a bill lands under the wrong account, fix the cell once. Penny prefers your correction for that supplier from then on.

How bills reach her

Any or all of these, and none of them need you to touch n8n:

• Email. Label it AI/Bills in Gmail (or apply the category in Outlook) and it files itself within a minute. Our AI Email Triage template applies the label automatically; a plain Gmail filter works too.
• A filing address. Give Penny an address like [email protected]. Anything forwarded there gets filed.
• Chat. Attach a receipt photo or PDF to a message to Penny. No setup at all.
• Your phone. Add Penny’s snap page to your Home Screen. One tap opens the camera; snap a dozen receipts and send them all at once.
• A webhook, if you have a developer who wants to push documents in from somewhere else.

It runs in your instance, not ours

This is the part we care most about. Penny doesn’t live in someone else’s SaaS account. She’s installed into your n8n instance, writes to your data tables, and stores the documents where you choose — on the instance itself, in your Google Drive, in your OneDrive, or in storage you bring. Your register is a table you can open, export, and hand to whoever does your books. If you ever leave, it leaves with you.

The AI that reads the documents is your own OpenRouter account, at roughly half a cent per document. And every record is already marked ready to export, so the register is built for the Xero push template when it ships.

Day to day, you do nothing. That’s the point.

Bills that arrive by email file themselves. Odd ones get dropped into chat. Your bookkeeper opens the register with the evidence one click away. If something didn’t file, you ask Penny why — she checks the record and tells you.

Getting started

Penny installs from the Awesomate Hub on any plan from Essentials up. Setup is a conversation, not a build:

1. In the Hub, go to Settings → Redeem and enter your bundle code. Pick the Local Files bundle unless you have a reason not to — zero storage setup. (Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 bundles exist for teams that want documents in Drive or OneDrive.)
2. Open your Chat Hub, pick Penny, and say “Help me set up my bill filing.” She reads your live settings first — she never guesses — then walks you through the gaps one question at a time.
3. Drop your chart of accounts CSV into the chat.
4. Tell her how bills will arrive.
5. In n8n, flip the Transaction Capture pipeline to Active. It’s the one switch she can’t flip for you.
6. Say “Run a test document through the pipeline,” then drop in a real receipt. About thirty seconds later you’re looking at the filed record: supplier, total, GST, expense account, document link.

Defaults are Australian — GST and AUD. Somewhere else? Tell Penny your tax system, currency and financial-year start, one sentence each, and she writes the settings for you.

Install Penny from the Awesomate Hub, or read the full setup guide in the Help Centre. Not on Awesomate yet? Any plan from Essentials up includes the n8n instance she runs on.