In this video, I demonstrate how to automate the organization of receipts from emails using Relay.app. The tool extracts receipts from emails and saves them in a specified Google Drive folder. I show how to set up triggers, filters, and actions to streamline the process.
0:00 Hi, I’m just going to show you a really quick and easy automation that will get all your receipts that come via email.
0:11 It will pull the receipts out of those emails and store them in a Google folder that you specify. I’m going to specify receipts in this instance.
0:21 So, the tool is called relay.app and the free version will do this job. There is a paid version to do more jobs or if you can have more automations.
0:33 But it’s really interesting and easy to use app for simple automations. Now chose receipts in Gmail because so many times I want to find all my receipts or invoices that have come to me in e-mails and sometimes you know I forget them all hard to find but I just want us to have a be able to have a look
1:05 somewhere where these receipts end or invoices are. So we’ll do it with receipts today but we’ll click New Workflow to start with.
1:15 Now all workflows have a trigger and then an action that was sometimes multiple actions. So we want to actually look in Gmail and we want the action to start when we receive an email.
1:29 And if there’s a conversation in this, I only want to trigger the first email for that conversation. Now, I do want to have a filter because I only want emails that have the word receipt in the subject.
1:44 So, I’m going to add a filter there, I’m going to add the subject, contains receipt. could possibly use the body in there, but subject will do for the moment.
1:56 And one of the nice things about this is it shows you examples of emails that have got the word receipt in the subject So I now click done.
2:09 I know that this is fairly accurate because it’s picked all those. I click down. So that’s step one done. you always have to have to add another step because you’ve got to have an action that happens.
2:20 So we’re going to add a step here. And one of the things about this is which I might do at the moment, but you can do a thing where a trigger happens and then you might not want to send all of them to do the next step, so you can get approval, a human in the loop.
2:41 And I don’t think any other automations, we’ve got that to halt it until you approve it. And you’ve also got a whole lot of AI things there.
2:53 But for the moment, we’re going to go to your Google Drive and I want to upload a file. Now, if you haven’t, when you’re first starting this, it will ask you to connect relay.app to both your Gmail and your Google Drive.
3:14 And that’s just simple follow the steps. I’ve already approved them to do that. And then so now you’ve got my drive.
3:24 I can search for receipts or start typing in receipts. So that’s where I want the receipt to go to. Now, the here, this stage here, you want to select a file.
3:39 So you’ve got to go to the email thing and you really want to get the attachment because the receipt, that’s what we’re trying to save is the receipts and first result, this file.
3:53 So that’s in case you have multiple receipts. This only gets the first receipt. I’m going to keep the file name the same as the original file.
4:03 So that you’re saving the PDF file to your Google Drive. So then you click Done. the best thing to do now is to always do a test run.
4:14 So I’m going to start a test run. it gives you a choice of ones to do or things I’m using relay.app and now I pay for this but you don’t have to, you can do this with a free version, so I can click on that that’s I’m going to create a test run with that create test run now it was array it’s getting ready
4:38 for you to do the test run So now you start this run and you’ll see it says this one is complete we’ll go back to the workflow in a minute but we want to check that it actually did go up into our receipts folder and there you can see the receipt in there with the original name which is usually as good
4:57 as you want as in my receipts folder and then now that you’ve done that test run It’s very easy to go back to your workflow and you can do two things you can rename it Okay, so this is a Gmail receipts to G trial.
5:31 I’m learning to spell as a good idea. Oh, shit. Sorry. right, so I’ve got Gmail. I’ve just renamed that. But it’s always good to name them very, very specifically.
5:43 Now the thing that we need to do now is to turn it on. once that’s done, next time I get an email with the word receipt in the subject header, I don’t have to do anything in the background that will add the receipt in here.
6:02 And there’s so many things you can do with this Relay.app, it’s a really an amazing little tool.
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