Turn Unstructured Emails to Actionable Data

Nova Logistics, a fictional company, receives quote requests from customers via email with attached PDFs containing shipping details. Currently, someone at Nova manually opens each email, downloads the PDF, reads through it, and extracts key information, which takes hours. This article will guide through building a tool to automate this process, from fetching emails to sending extracted information to Google Sheets. The tool will use the Gmail API to fetch emails, Documind to extract structured data from PDFs, and Google Sheets API to store the extracted data. To build the tool, we'll need to set up a few things, including installing Node.js, required libraries, and getting API credentials for Gmail, Google Sheets, Supabase, and Documind. We'll also need to set up a project on Supabase to store PDFs and create a new integration on Nango for user authentication. The code will be written in small steps, starting with setting up environment variables, then fetching emails using the Gmail API, and uploading PDFs to Supabase. Next, we'll extract data from the PDFs using Documind and store the extracted data in Google Sheets. The tool will automate the entire process, saving time and increasing efficiency.