Automatically upload receipts from email attachments to DropBox

[woter324]

Hi,

I hope this hasn’t been covered before, but I thought I’d share a little time saving task that I’ve found. One of DropBox’s shortcomings is it’s ability, or lack of, to email to it. I know QF can, but emails have to come from a given address and be sent to a specific address to end up in the Receipt Hub. Clearly, we can’t register receipts@quickfile.co.uk with our suppliers.

I guess some may have heard of “If That Then This” (IFTTT) - an “Internet of Things” automation tool that allows one to automate things between cloud services such as Gmail and DropBox. Unfortunately, it falls short on available filters. i.e. it can upload email attachments to DropBox, but it does it for any email and (AFAIK) there’s no way to filter it on a specific From Address or subject, unless it has a # in the subject. I’m guessing most supplier emails won’t have the hash.

Introducing Zapier. It’s IFTTT on steroids, and like IFTTT, it’s free. I’ve just created a “Zap” that detects an email from a given address, with a given subject and moves the attachment to QF’s DropBox folder.

At the moment, I can’t see a way of sharing the “Zap” like one can with IFTTT’s recipes, but it’s fairly straight forward. If you allow access to Gmail and Dropbox, it even picks up the folders. Note, to show subfolders , select Apps first, then click again to see the subfolder of “Quick File Receipts”

I am using Gmail mostly, but it supports hundreds of trigger and action web services, including MS Exchange - Not sure what your IT department will think of that!

Anyway, hope this helps and if there’s a requirement, I can do a little step-by-step guide.

Thanks

W.

[woter324]

I have just come across one problem: If your supplier send multiple files in one email, then Zapier zips them up, meaning QF can’t see the extension.

I’ve written to them asking if they can add an option to turn this feature off. Finger’s crossed.

[Glenn]

That’s interesting, thanks for sharing. I hadn’t heard of IFTTT but there are a couple of discussions here about Zapier, we were looking at some form of direct integration with Zapier but it looks like we’d need to modify our API authentication mechanism first.