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  • Can I automate the daily task of getting team locations and emailing them to a 3rd party?

I was looking for some help please on the best way to achieve a daily task which our company does. 
 

The task itself - we need to get the locations of our teams every morning then once we have that info we then email it to a 3rd party.

 

We currently do this our companies WhatsApp group chat. It involves me setting daily alarms and manually messaging the chat, then taking the responses and putting them in an email then sending it off the 3rd party.


I was thinking potentially I could do this via the email parser and google sheets, then I thought maybe via SMS, however I keep getting stuck at the new daily sheet which would be needed and then sending that onto the specific 3rd party email address.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated! :) 

 

Welcome to the Community @DJPRH! 👋

Can you tell us where the location information for each day is stored? Am I right in thinking that it’s in a Google Sheets spreadsheet?

If so, is the relevant location information for each team contained within a single row or multiple rows? If it’s multiple rows, are those being manually added to the new “daily sheet” you mentioned, rather than all being added into a single worksheet on the same spreadsheet?

Can you share a screenshot showing an example of information you’re looking to send out daily? That would help us to better determine the best approach for achieving the desired workflow here. Please remove/hide any private information from the screenshot before sharing (like names, email addresses etc.).

Looking forward to hearing from you! 🙂

Hi @SamB,

 

Thank you for responding! :)

 

Currently I just store the responses in my mobiles notes (I know not very professional), before I send them off via an email 😅

The information itself is small and will consist of a team number and usually 5-6 digits afterwards.

Currently the process is as follows:

 

  1. Whatsapp - Message group chat asking for locations
  2. Whatsapp - Responses come in which look like - “Team 1 - 17238” & “Team 2 - 37585”
  3. I take a note of this in my phones ‘Notes’ app
  4. I then put them together in one email them over to a specific email address

This is done every weekday (Monday - Friday) at 7.50am.

 

My hope was that I could create a Google sheet, then generate a new tab daily.

Then scheduled a daily email to go out to the teams (or even an sms instead if possible).

Then when the teams replied individually to the email there locations either via email or sms - it would populate the Google sheet with their response.

I could then just give my colleague the link to the sheet where they could check it daily for locations rather than having to create and send a daily email to them.

 

If you have any advice it would be greatly appreciated?

 

Many thanks,

Damien 

Thanks for getting back to me @DJPRH! 

Well, if you want it to create a new tab for every single day then you could use a Create Worksheet action to create a new tab (worksheet). But I wonder if it might work better to simplify things and just take the information extracted from the email by Email Parser by Zapier, then adding it to a single row in one spreadsheet that has the date and the location number under each team names.

For example:

e0ae7571a92fa5990f20fb836807e49a.png

So the Zap would consist of the following trigger and action:

  • Trigger: New Email (Email Parser by Zapier) - triggers from the email reply and parses out the different team location information into different fields. See: Trigger Zaps from new parsed emails.
  • Action: Create Spreadsheet Row (Google Sheets) - takes information parsed from the email and adds it under the relevant columns on the new row.


Just thinking that would mean that you wouldn’t need to send a link to your colleagues for each new daily sheet that’s added. They could all just check the same sheet. Would that be a viable option or does it definitely need to be a new daily tab created?

That said, to further reduce the amount of manual work you’re currently having to do, I wonder if it might be worth adjusting the process by getting the teams to fill out a short online form maybe? One where they just select their team name and the location, rather than sending a daily text to you? Or if you used something like Google Forms maybe even just the location as you could likely generate a special links to the form for each of them that would prefill relevant team name for them.

Does that sound like it could be a viable option or would the information need to be sent via email or SMS only? 

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