Are you tired of sifting through endless emails and attachments to find your invoices and receipts? Imagine having all your invoices and receipts neatly organized and easily accessible at any time. With the power of Bubble.io and Make.com, you can automate this process and save hours of manual work! 🕒✨

In this blog, we’ll walk you through a scenario that stores all your invoices and receipts in Google Drive and a database, allowing you to find what you need quickly and effortlessly. Whether you use Gmail, Outlook, or any other email provider, this automation will work for you.

Getting Started: Setting Up Your Email Trigger 📧

The first step in this automation is to set up an email trigger. For this example, we’ll use Gmail, but you can use other email providers as well. Here’s how:

• Create a label (folder) in Gmail called “Invoices.”
• Set up a Gmail filter to automatically tag incoming emails with this label.
• Watch this folder for new emails using Make.com.

This setup ensures that any email tagged as an invoice will trigger the automation scenario. 📨

Extracting Invoice Amounts with Regex 🧮

Next, we’ll use regex (regular expressions) to extract the dollar amounts from the email body. This involves finding the dollar symbol and capturing the subsequent digits. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Escape the dollar symbol as it’s a special character in regex.
• Use a named capture group to capture digit values followed by a period and more digits.
• Aggregate matches to find the total amount.

This ensures we capture all relevant amounts, including tax, subtotal, and total. 🧾

Uploading Attachments to Google Drive 📂

Now, let’s handle email attachments. If an email has a PDF attachment (common for invoices and receipts), we’ll upload it to Google Drive. Here’s what we do:

• Filter for PDF attachments to avoid uploading unnecessary files like signatures or logos.
• Create a custom file name with the format: YYYYMMDD_SenderName.

This naming convention keeps your files organized and easy to find. 📅

Storing Data in Airtable 📊

We also want to store invoice data in a database like Airtable. This includes details like:

• Date received
• Google Drive file URL
• Supplier name
• Email subject and body
• Total amount

This allows for quick access and further manipulation if needed. 🗄️

Handling Edge Cases 🚧

There are a few edge cases to consider:

• If no attachment is found, create a blank record.
• If the total amount is not in the email body, consider converting the PDF to a text file and extracting the amount.

Tools like CloudConvert can help you convert PDFs to text files or Word documents for further processing. 📑

Conclusion 🎉

This automation scenario is a game-changer for managing invoices and receipts. By leveraging Bubble.io and Make.com, you can save time, reduce errors, and keep your documents organized. Whether it’s tax time or end-of-quarter billing, you’ll have everything you need at your fingertips. Try it out and see the difference it makes! 🚀

Happy automating! 😊