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Event Budget Reconciliation

Example prompt: "Every Friday, compare our event budget spreadsheet against paid invoices in Xero. Categorise each invoice against the right budget line, flag any line items that are over by more than 10%, and post a summary to the #events Slack channel with the categories that are on track and those that need attention."

The Problem

An event has a budget spreadsheet with categories — venue, catering, AV, printing, travel — and invoices land in the accounting system named and coded in ways that rarely match cleanly. Reconciling the two takes someone going line by line, guessing which invoice belongs to which budget category, and flagging overruns. It usually gets done once, very late, right before the post-event wash-up, which is exactly when you cannot act on what you find.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a scheduled workflow that runs each Friday morning. An integration step reads the current budget from the Google Sheet, then a second integration step pulls the week's paid invoices from Xero. An LLM step categorises each invoice against the right budget line using the vendor name and description. A code step aggregates spend per category and compares it to the budgeted figure, flagging any line that is overspent beyond the tolerance you choose. A final integration step posts a compact summary to Slack — categories on track, categories at risk, and categories already overspent. The Glass Box preview shows the categorisation decisions and variance table before anything posts, so you can correct any miscategorised invoices.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (scheduled): Runs every Friday at 09:00.
  2. Step 1 (integration): Read budget lines from the Google Sheets event budget.
  3. Step 2 (integration): Fetch paid invoices for this event from Xero.
  4. Step 3 (LLM): Categorise each invoice against the right budget line.
  5. Step 4 (code): Aggregate actual spend per category and calculate variance versus budget.
  6. Step 5 (conditional): Flag categories where variance exceeds the chosen tolerance.
  7. Step 6 (integration): Post the reconciliation summary to the Slack channel.

Integrations Used

  • Google Sheets — stores the event budget with planned spend per category
  • Xero — source of paid invoices and vendor names
  • Slack — delivers the weekly reconciliation summary

Who This Is For

Event producers and finance partners running medium-to-large events where invoices come in across several weeks and the team needs an early warning when a category is drifting, rather than a single reconciliation after the event.

Time & Cost Saved

A careful weekly reconciliation across 40-60 invoices typically takes 90 minutes for someone who knows the budget well, and longer for anyone else. Over a three-month run-up to an event that adds up to around a day of work per month. This workflow produces the same summary in one run and gets better at categorisation as the vendor list stabilises. Uses integration, LLM, and code steps, costing a modest number of credits per run.