When you manage a VSE, an SME or even a self-employed business, and you have to juggle a lot of costs (fixed, variable, supplier, exceptional costs, etc.), it is not necessarily easy to find your way around in terms of cash flow management.

Management control is one of the solutions allowing very detailed calculation of production or labor costs related to a task, a production or a product. However, it is a specialized discipline which is not necessarily within everyone's reach, whether in terms of skills or simply time.

So, while trying to manage my different activities, I looked for a super simple tool which would allow me, with a summary table which would take 2 minutes to skim, a way to monitor in real time the charges by type of charge, and above all to have some sort of effective result month by month.

Something really not complicated and accessible to everyone, without complicated features and which does not require special skills. As I did not find a super simple tool and above all accessible in terms of price, I decided to create myself a small dashboard for cash flow management and expense monitoring on Google Sheets.

To do this, I simply connected Zapier to Google Sheets via Dext. Dext is an invoice scanning tool that sends invoices to your accountant for reprocessing. In use, Dext automatically recognizes the supplier in question and classifies the invoice in the correct expense account (the famous accounting code).

So, all we had to do was tell Dext to send the invoices to Google Sheets via the Zapier automation tool, and for each scanned invoice, a line is created on Google Sheets with the invoice amounts ( excluding tax, tax included and VAT), the name of the supplier, the charge account and of course the date.

From there, in another tab, simply create a line per charge account and sum the amounts per charge account and per month for example, so as to obtain, for each month, the amount excluding VAT linked to such or such charge account.

At the end, you enter your monthly turnover, possibly your other expenses (salaries, VAT due and deductible VAT) and you have a kind of at least approximate result, provided you have really gathered and digitized all your invoices, and by checking from time to time that your invoices are classified in the correct charge account, especially for new suppliers not necessarily identified by Dext.

So be careful, it wasn't necessarily easy to convert the digital formats sent by Dext, which are Anglo-Saxon formats, with a French Google Sheets file, so I had to configure the Google Sheets file in the "United Kingdom" format to avoid calculation bugs.

If this file can help, I leave it for free download, and of course, it will evolve over time according to everyone's needs...

Management tool

Regarding the settings to be made in Zapier, here it is: