Joe Unsworth Creative - Joe Unsworth

PDF.co Project Showcase

Client/Project Industry

Motion Pictures/Film, Photography

Client Name

Ourselves!

Company Size

1-10 employees.

Project Summary

Any small-medium business owner understands the pain of business admin. From travel to business equipment and a constant stream of expenses to taxes and VAT, there’s a lot of paperwork to keep on top of.

Sure, working freelance or running a company comes with many benefits if you enjoy that way of working, but there are also a lot of responsibilities when it comes to organizing your expenses, taxes, etc. We all know it’s coming, yet somehow, some of us still manage to get to December in a blind panic as the reality of HMRC deadlines begins to set in, and the thought of collating the past year’s worth of expenses fills you with dread.

How many companies send you electronic receipts for your orders and expenses? How many don’t even bother to attach PDF invoices to their emails? I’d estimate that when we recently became VAT registered, we probably spent a total of 3 months sorting through thousands of emails, logging into subscription platforms and admin portals, to track down e-receipts or online invoices.

The purpose of this project was to reduce some of the manual workloads when it comes to our accounts, by automating our digital receipt organization process.

Project Goals

– Reduce manual accounting workload
– Automate our digital receipt organization process
– Sort all emails with a specific ‘label’ into a Google Drive folder
– Reduce the time required every month for our accounting consolidation

Project Challenges

Configuring the filters in Gmail is going to take a bit of time. We’re still working on this because we need to make sure the filters don’t let anything through that we don’t want to be converted to a PDF.

Any emails that haven’t been set up to be automatically given the label, won’t be automatically converted to a PDF. But these emails can simply be drag-and-dropped into the label in Gmail, and that will trigger the automation.

PDF.co is used for

Up until now, our expense workflow looked something like this: Screenshots of emails, print to, save as, rename, add in the date, oops – wrong date format, save to the right location, cross-reference with finance trackers or your accounts…. That’s a lot of steps, for every. single. purchase. But what if there was a smarter way of automating all of this manual work?

By using PDF.co with the Zapier API integration, we can instead simply drag-and-drop emails containing an e-receipt / digital invoice as text (not an attachment) and drop it onto a label in Gmail. Then, PDF.co takes care of everything and automatically converts these emails into PDF documents, before passing them to Zapier for re-naming and uploading to our preferred Google Drive folder.

So now at the end of each month, all we have to do is just drag and drop all of the PDFs into our accounting software; and hey presto, we’ve got rock-solid records of all our receipts tied to every payment.

PDF.co Results

We’re going to save so much time every month using this new process, which in turn, allows us to focus even more on our clients’ projects.

Even though we have invested in online accounting software and have spent weeks getting everything configured, there was still one huge manual element tied to this: keeping track of, organizing, and uploading all our e-receipts and email invoices.

With this new process, we can set up ‘filters’ in Gmail to automatically add incoming emails to a ‘label’, thus triggering the Zap to generate a PDF of the email, via PDF.co, and upload it to our Google Drive Expenses folder.

Project Screenshots:

Connect with Joe Unsworth for your next automation project:

Website: https://www.joeunsworth.com/