When digital employees flooded my feed, I handed WorkBuddy 27 expense reports at month-end

Last Tuesday at 8:30 PM, I had 27 reimbursement detail sheets from various departments spread out on my desk, and my phone notifications were full of OpenClaw. Stuff like 24/7 no rest, no desk needed, no social insurance required digital employees—the headlines got more aggressive one after another.

I read for two minutes, scrolled down to the security section, and closed the page.

From March 8 to 13, the MIIT's NVDB and the National Internet Emergency Center issued security alerts one after another. Attackers only need to hide a single instruction in a webpage to trick the agent into spitting out keys, deleting emails, and taking over the computer.

I'm a cashier, and my computer holds the whole company's bank statements and reimbursement records. I wouldn't dare install something like that on my own machine. But honestly, the need for something that stands in for you is real. These last few days of the month, I really did want someone to go through those 27 sheets for me first.

In the end, WorkBuddy did it. I've used it for two months and have a pretty good feel for its temperament—it can handle this job.

I'll walk through exactly how it goes, step by step, so first-timers can just follow along.

First open WorkBuddy. On the left is the workspace—you can think of it as a plot of land you've marked out for it; it can only operate within that plot. Create a new folder, I named mine "October Reimbursements," and drag all 27 sheets into it. There are electronic PDFs, screenshots taken with phones, and two xlsx files the departments made themselves.

Don't rush to let it run. The first step is configuring the rules.

Click the gear icon in the top right to enter settings, and find the "Field Extraction" section. The term is a bit confusing the first time you see it, but it just means telling it which columns to pull out of each sheet. I filled in six: reimbursee, department, date, amount, invoice number, expense type.

Here are the two key parameters. For the amount column, set the type to numeric—don't use the default text. For the date format, choose YYYY-MM-DD. If you don't set these two, the amounts in the exported summary table will be text, and summing them will just give you 0, and date sorting will be a mess too. That's exactly how I got burned the first time—I stared at a 0 for ages.

After configuring, click run. When it finishes, it won't export directly—it first gives you a preview page, with the six columns extracted from each sheet laid out row by row. You must look at this page.

I usually pick three to manually check: one electronic, one photographed, and the department-made ones especially need checking. Once they match, proceed.

There's a pitfall here worth mentioning. The two xlsx files the departments made themselves both have amount columns—one tax-inclusive, one tax-exclusive. WorkBuddy by default merges columns with the same name into one, and the result is both amount columns get messed up. There are two workarounds: either rename the columns before importing, writing them as "Amount-TaxIncl" and "Amount-TaxExcl," or manually specify in the field mapping step which column from which worksheet to take. I chose the former—saves hassle.

Also, it often misses the invoice remarks column. Nothing to be done about that—after exporting, I go through and fill them in myself, about three to five minutes for 27 sheets.

I keep permissions pretty tight. In settings there's an "Allowed Write Scope"—I set the source directory to read-only and pointed the output to a separate folder called Summary. It can't touch the originals; even if it runs wrong, all it deletes is the copy it generated itself. This habit was formed earlier—drawing clear boundaries for a tool is more important than how many features it has.

Once it ran through, I saved this configuration as a template. Next month I just switch folders, apply the template, and run directly—don't even need to reset the parameters.

For first-timers, I suggest trying with five sheets first. Run through once, see what the preview looks like and where the pitfalls are, then scale up. If you throw thirty sheets at it right away, when something goes wrong you won't even know which step caused it.

This month this job took me about twenty minutes; before, it was half an afternoon.