Clean employee expense CSVs before the accounting upload

Monday's task: get the expense report CSV into the accounting system before the deadline. But one employee wrote dates as 03/04, another as 4-Mar, and a third let the tool export 2026-03-04. Some amounts are in euros, some in dollars, and a handful of rows have no receipt flag at all. The accounting upload wants one date format, one currency convention, and a clear yes/no on receipts.

You could fix each cell by hand, again, or you could build a workflow that standardizes any month's expense export the same way every time.

The three things that always need fixing

• Dates in a dozen formats that the upload parser rejects.
• Multiple currencies with no consistent marker, so totals mix euros and dollars.
• Missing or blank receipt flags that should never be treated as "receipt provided."

The standardizing workflow

1. Trim & Clean the date, amount, and currency columns.
2. Date Convert every date into the single ISO format the accounting system expects.
3. Type Convert amounts to numbers, and Map Values to normalize currency codes to a consistent set.
4. Fill Empty on the receipt flag so blanks become an explicit "missing" rather than silently passing.
5. Validate that each row has a valid date, a positive amount, and a receipt flag — flag the exceptions.

Turn exceptions into a follow-up list

The receipt separates the rows that are ready to upload from the ones that need a human. Missing receipt? Unreadable date? Those land in the rejected pile with a reason, which becomes your "please fix and resubmit" list instead of an audit surprise later.