Built

Costs in order, trip by trip

A dashboard to keep the costs of a quarter's training trips under control, one by one: what had been budgeted, what we actually spent and what has to be passed on to accounting at the end of the month, for both the invoices to issue and the ones to pay.

Type: Data
Year: 2026
Tools: Claude

The question

How do you keep every cost of the training trips under control when each one has to be reported in two different ways?

The experiment

A dashboard with a card for each trip: date, budget, actual costs, invoices and reimbursements, so as not to lose a single expense.

The result

Keeping track of expenses has become extremely simple. At the end of each month I compare the dashboard with the original Excel file, check that everything is correct and report it all to accounting.

The learning

AI does not always have to do all the work. Sometimes its job is to check mine.

The full story

The need

Keeping the budget under control is part of my job, but certainly not the most fun part, nor the easiest. After a first quarter spent obsessively checking the trainers’ travel expenses, I wondered whether there was a better way to have at hand the original estimate, the money actually spent on hotels, transport, meeting rooms, catering and shipping and, of course, the trainers’ reimbursements. All this not only to know exactly where things stood, but also to give both the client and our accounting department all the information, accurate to the cent.

How it works

The result, born from a brainstorm with Claude, is once again a dashboard made of a single HTML file, so it is easy to open and read in any browser. Inside are the essential details of each trip, from the date to the place, and for each category (for example transport or catering) the estimate, the actual cost, the date and, if already available, the invoice.

The dashboard also lets me enter the trainers’ reimbursements easily, with the details of the expenses, and classifies them automatically: a taxi counts as transport, a restaurant goes under meals. That way I have the total, overall and per trip, split both by the categories the client needs and by the ones accounting needs.

All this information flows into an overview that helps me see at a glance what is missing and what is already in place and that, at the end of the month, lets me check whether the numbers entered in the Excel files match.

The re-invoicing view of a travel budget dashboard: total re-invoiced against the budget, budget by item with progress bars, and a table with estimate, actual cost, taxable amount and invoice status for every line of each trip. — The re-invoicing view, with invented retailers, trips and figures: estimate and actual cost of every line, and the budget left.

What I learned

From a technical point of view there is nothing new compared with the other HTML tools I have built with Claude, but it let me try a new approach: it saves me time, gives me very precise results and, at the same time, reassures me about the quality of my work.

The real plus of this dashboard is exactly this: it reduces my anxiety, knowing that the numbers add up and that, if I were to make mistakes, there is someone who can help me spot and fix them before it is too late.