WorkBuddy summarizing reimbursement spreadsheets: Who should read the files?

I've used WorkBuddy for about a month, previously just running daily report templates with it. This time I wanted to try something trickier: automatically summarizing a bunch of expense reimbursement xlsx files in Downloads into a weekly table. I saw in a beginner tutorial that modes shouldn't be mixed, so I tried Craft, Plan, and Ask separately.

At first, I dragged the folder into the task, selected Craft, and wrote "Read all reimbursement tables in the current directory, merge by date, amount, and category, output xlsx." It spun around for a while, said it couldn't find the files, and just gave me an explanation. I suspected permissions, followed the tutorial to authorize Downloads, and ran it again. This time it could read, but the generated table fields were all misaligned, dates turned into numbers, and categories had extra null values.

Later I switched to Plan. It listed steps, looked pretty reasonable, and after I confirmed execution, the artifact area didn't have any downloadable files. Ask mode was the most stable, but also the most useless—it just told me what I should do.

Now I'm stuck on whether task context or workspace counts as the "current directory." Do I have to re-mount files from the workspace every time I create a new task, rather than just relying on local folder authorization?

Has anyone encountered similar situations? I just wanted to save writing two lines of pandas code, but now it feels like cleaning up after a very polite intern who doesn't do the work. Maybe I misunderstood, or maybe WorkBuddy really isn't suitable for practicing with dirty data like expense reports. Just looking for a reliable explanation.