A daily money snapshot: today's takings in a Telegram message every evening

What you'll have in twenty-five minutes: a short message that lands in your Telegram every evening — "Today: 23 sales, S$1,910. Best seller: iced latte." — so you close the day knowing your numbers without opening a spreadsheet or a POS dashboard. It's the calm end-of-day habit most owners mean to build and never do.

Owners keep asking for exactly this — one wanted the figures "emailed to someone in the business instead of having to log on daily to extract manually" (Shopify Community, 2025). Manual daily reporting quietly eats 30–45 minutes a day for many small businesses. This gives that time back.

Read this first — the one requirement

This playbook automates the summary, not the typing. It assumes your sales already land in a Google Sheet — from a POS that exports a daily CSV, from an order form, or because you or your staff log them. If your sales live only inside a card terminal with no export, start there: either switch on your POS's CSV/Sheets export, or keep a dead-simple sales sheet. Once sales reach a sheet, the rest of this is quick.

Is this for you?

Build it if your sales already sit in (or can be exported to) a sheet and you want a daily pulse without logging into anything. Skip it if you already get a daily summary you're happy with from your POS.

What it costs

S$0 per month (verified 13 July 2026): Google Sheets free, Make free plan (1,000 credits/month, no card — Make), Telegram free. A once-a-day run uses a trickle of your free credits.

Before you start

A Google account, the Telegram app, and a free Make account with a bot — the same kit as the receipt-to-sheet flagship. Done that one? You'll finish this in fifteen minutes.

Build it, step by step

Step 1 — Your sales sheet (5 minutes)

A Google Sheet named "Sales" with row 1: Date, Item, Amount. However sales arrive — POS export, order form, manual — get them into these columns. Dates as YYYY-MM-DD; amounts as plain numbers.

Step 2 — The evening summary in Make (15 minutes)

A two-module scenario:

Module 1 — Google Sheets → "Search Rows". Connect Google (accept the access pop-up), choose your Sales sheet, and filter Date — equal to — today (Make has a "now/today" value you can pick). Click Run once so real rows load and the fields show up.

Module 2 — Telegram Bot → "Send a Message". Connect your bot, pick your Chat ID (message the bot first). For the numbers, use Make's built-in maths on Module 1's results — the count of rows and the sum of Amount — and write:

💰 Today: {{number of sales}} sales, S${{total}}. Nice one.

(If adding up the total feels fiddly, the template includes the exact setup so you can copy it rather than build the maths yourself.)

Step 3 — Send it at closing time

Set the scheduling toggle ON to a daily time that suits you — say 9pm, or whenever you shut. Every evening, the snapshot arrives.

Test it works (2 minutes)

Add two pretend sales rows dated today, then click Run once. The Telegram message should show 2 sales and their combined amount. Delete the test rows afterwards.

When it doesn't

• The message says zero sales when there were some. Almost always a date format mismatch — the sheet must use YYYY-MM-DD and match how Make reads "today". Fix the date column format.
• The total is wrong or blank. Amounts are stored as text, so they won't add up. Re-type them as plain numbers.
• An empty summary on a slow day. That's correct, not a bug — no sales today means nothing to total. You can add a friendly "quiet day today" line if you prefer.

Your data

Daily totals aren't personal data, so the PDPA isn't triggered. Your takings are commercially sensitive, though — send the snapshot to a private Telegram chat (just you, or you and a co-owner), not a group, and keep the Sales sheet shared only with people who should see the money.

Switch it off

Pause or delete the scenario; the evening messages stop. The sheet stays yours. Nothing was charged.

What's next

Get the sales sheet and summary template — it has the row-counting and totalling already wired so you skip the maths. You now know this Telegram-and-Sheet pattern cold; the low-stock alert is the same trick aimed at your shelves. And the receipt flagship closes the loop on the other side of the ledger — money out.

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