How to Email into SmartSuite (to Automate HR Data Entry) with Email Parser by Zapier

Most of us need to use multiple pieces of software to make our day to day or our business operations function. We generally have these specialty tools for things like bookkeeping or HR that because they are so important and so confidential, they don't tend to play well with the other tools we have inside our tech stack. For example, maybe you use Gusto for HR like we do here at ProcessDriven and you want to get information about the new hire who just accepted your onboarding letter into your work management software where you actually go to find all of your tasks in SmartSuite. Well, normally, because Gusto and tools like it rarely connect well with the tools you have elsewhere, we would need to manually retype that information. When we have the new hire, we create the new area in SmartSuite. When we have the new time off request, we create the new record in SmartSuite. And that creation is a lot of manual data entry that can really slow down in this example, an HR function, but really any function of your business. So in this video I want to talk about how we can leverage email. Yeah, everyone's favorite topic, email to be our conduit and connect two tools together that don't otherwise have a direct connection. While this can apply to so many use cases, our specific example today is going to talk about HR data entry for time off requests that we might generate via Gusto that then come in via email. Then every time we get that email, we're going to have that email automatically be transferred into SmartSuite with all the relevant details so that the relevant manager can approve it. And rather than manual data entry being required in that middle step, we'll make sure it's automated using a tool called Zapier. Thanks so much SmartSuite for sponsoring this video. And let's dive in. Step one in our automation journey is to know what we are automating. And yes, we need to know the process here, but specifically, specifically what kind of communication should kick off this automated thing? If you are like most people, you are going to be automating after you have done something manually for a while. So you should have a very clear idea as to what we're looking for. If that's not the case for you, you might want to hold off on this whole process and take some time to do things manually until this is a quick answer. In my case, it's a quick answer. I want time off requests like the one you see here generated from our HR software Gusto to automatically become records assigned to whoever's approving them. In SmartSuite so our managers can easily find this information and approve it when they start their day in SmartSuite and look at my work. I want those requests to show up here so people aren't having to work in their email to complete this step, make sure you grab at least one example of what this email looks like and keep it on hand. Open it in a new tab, have it handy because we're going to want to be able to reference what's unique about this email and in order to focus our trigger down the line. In this case, I know that these request emails always have the language requested time off. They always come from the Gusto email and they always have a subject line that looks something like this. This information is going to be useful to me for later, but for now just identify it and set it to the side. Step two in our process of automation is going to the opposite side and figuring out our end destination. Where do we want things to end up? Lucky for me, I've already made my life super easy and I've installed the template called Time off requests into my SmartSuite account. This template includes all of the key elements I need in order to bring this to life. But depending on what data you're automating, you might need a different type of template or to create one from scratch. Basically, you just want to make sure whatever your process is, you've got a spot for it in SmartSuite. Thank goodness for SmartSuite templates because it makes it really fast to get these set up. Once we've identified this spot, we can once again set this to the side because we will need this later on. But for now we'll we can focus just on the connection piece, which is really where our time's gonna be spent today. To connect our email to SmartSuite, we have two options available to us. The first option is to use the Automations feature inside of SmartSuite and look for the trigger, meaning the kickoff that relates to our email. Whether that's Google Gmail, whatever you wanna call it, or Outlook or something else, we could use that email as our kickoff. At the time of recording this video, I'm being impatient and I don't wanna wait for when both of these options are available. So just to give us more flexibility and to make sure you get this help as quick, I'm going to go through option number two. The second method involves going up to the top of your page, scrolling on down until you see zapier and giving that a click. The zapier option, which is a Third party tool that connects things together works very similarly to the integrations, but it gives us a bit more flexibility in that it allows us to connect to many more tools versus just SmartSuite to Zapier. So if we had a more complicated workflow that'd be nice to have. When you click on it, you will see a page like this appear. And this is Zapier's website. On this page you will see a bunch of pre programmed connections available between SmartSuite and other tools. And that's really what Zapier does. By the way, in case you don't know, Zapier allows you to take a tool like SmartSuite and connect it with pretty much anything else on the Internet. Anything else that integrates with zapier and Zapier just acts as the middleman or the translator to make data from one tool make sense and connect to another tool. So in here if I scroll down on the SmartSuite integrations, we can see all of the many, many, many, many, many, many. I could just apps that SmartSuite can connect to. But because I know exactly what I want and I don't need to browse through all of those examples, I'm going to sign up using ProcessDriven's affiliate link or log in if I already have an account and go into the back end of zapier to create something custom from scratch just for this application. So go ahead, take a moment, sign up or log in and then we'll take it away from the dashboard. Once you log in, you're going to see a page that looks something like this. And this is kind of like our backend dashboard home inside of zapier. All you need to do is click the giant Create Zap button. When you give it a click, you're going to see something like this. And if you haven't gathered, this is very similar in setup to the SmartSuite automations we talked about earlier. Trigger action. Zapier and SmartSuite have very similar approaches to this. So as soon as you grasp one, you'll be fluent on both and they're really not as scary as they look. So first up we need to set our trigger. When does Zapier do something? Transfer information from our email to SmartSuite? Should it do it for all emails? Some emails. Well remember the email you identified earlier? That's going to be the one that we want to kick this off. And yes, we could have Zapier watch every email we ever send until one like that is received. But I prefer something a Little bit more flexible. And that's why we're going to choose the email Parser by Zapier instead. So Email Parser by Zapier is going to generate a zapier inbox and email address that when we send information into it, zapier is going to look at the whole email and break it out into data points that we can then use in our SmartSuite account. So it's not just one big email, it's little pieces under the event. We're going to say, anytime there is a new email received at this inbox, we are going to move forward and have something happen. Notice that it does remind you to set up your parser email account. You will need to do that in order to move forward with this particular method. So before we go on, let's take a moment to set up that parser inbox. To do that, we're going to go to yet another URL and set up our email parser. What this does, which is beautifully displayed on this website page here, is it looks at things sent to a certain email. It looks at them based on a template you create, and it breaks things down into pieces of data, things that you can extract and put easily into SmartSuite fields. This functionality, which is free, built into Zapier, very cool, allows us to ensure we're not just attaching an entire email to SmartSuite and we just have to figure out what the request is for. No, no, no. We can look at the email request and break it down into smaller pieces that can each end up in different fields. Assignee slots A requestee name Requestee D slots inside of SmartSuite. So on this page, we're going to go ahead and log in with our zapier account we just created before, then give them permission to talk to each other, because we are going to need that. Then once we're in here, we can start creating mailboxes. To create a mailbox which is basically a recipient for this whole thing, we're going to click Create Mailbox. Once we do that, we're going to see a page like this that allows us to take a URL to a specific inbox that zapier created. And we want to forward that example email we found in step one. So locate that original email and click forward to send it to your relevant inbox. This is what's going to kick it all off. Once you send the email, you can wait till zapier auto refreshes or just click the refresh page to look for a new email button. Once you do, you should see something like this pop up, which tells you that the email inbox has received your email. Yours might not have all these links in here, but it should have the contents of your email, even if it looks a little funky. For our purposes where our content we're trying to pull out is just the text information, I'm going to choose the plain text body content option to say, hey, just look at the words and not the styling. And then below this parser engine, I'm going to leave it with Best Match. Now, before we move on and say, okay, case closed, we need to take a second here and establish our template for this email. So what we need to do here is select sections of our email that came in and tell Zapier what this thing means. What does this word mean? What does this text mean? What should we do with this information? Everything we select here is going to be available as an option for us to put into an area of SmartSuite. So by breaking this down in a very detailed way, we can identify the data types to make it easier later on. In this example, what I'm going to do is first grab the requester's name and I'm going to call this requested by to reflect that this is the person requesting the time off. Next to that, I could also request the company. So if I had multiple companies that would have time off requests, I could put the company that they are requesting time off from. For me, it's always the same, so I'm going to skip that. Next, we have the date range, the time that's being requested off. I'm going to select this and call this Dates requested and click Save. And then I'm going to scroll all down to the body of the email and locate other information such as time requested and available hours remaining. So here I'm going to say time requested. I'm basically labeling this number as the amount of time that's being requested off. And then I'm going to label available hours in the same way. And then we have the section called Layla's Note. And I wrote Vacation. And we'll just say everything in this area is Requester's Note. Click Save. I could choose to add the link to Gusto here if I wanted to make it really easy for folks to click on it and get inside Augusto and approve it. But I don't think it's really necessary for this request since it's always going to be the same link every time. I could just have that set by default in SmartSuite. Reviewing my original email, there's nothing else I really need to get out of this email. So I'm going to leave it at that and click Save address and Template. Now that I have this email address ready, I'm going to go back to Zapier and continue setting up what happens with this data. So I'm going to choose new email from that email address. I'm going to click Continue. I'm going to choose the email parser account I just set up. So this one right here and I'm going to click Continue. Next up, I'm going to say which mailbox. If I had multiple, I'd need to choose them here. But in this case I'm just choosing the only one I have, which is this guy. If you had multiple email addresses, you would have multiple options here. But I'm going to go with the first one and click Continue. Finally, we get to the test step where Zapier is going to try to test to see if it can indeed get data from this email inbox. Now, I know that sounds scary, but really it just means click the button and see if it yells at you. Okay. In this case, look, didn't yell at us. Wasn't scary at all. If you're a little bit of a geek though, you could take a moment right here and just look at what came out so we can see what the email was, how it was received, and so on. And it looks pretty good. So from here I'm going to go ahead and click Continue and move on to the next step back in Zapier. Now, this is the fun part. This is where we tell Zapier what to do with the information it just gathered. So we have it watching for emails to this, looking at certain pieces of data and understanding what they mean. Now where do we put them? Answer's obvious, right? Smartsuite. Yes, that's the one. What we're going to do Here is Click SmartSuite from our Zapier dropdown and we have to set up Zapier so it connects with. Well, note for this and the email parser, these setup pieces are one time. Once you have this set up and connected, it's way faster. You can skip this step. But for now, here's how it goes. In the event area, we are going to create a new record because we want to create a new time off request over in this area where we have a record per request. Granted, there are a lot of other options you have here, but we just need the first one for now. Once we choose that we can click Continue and connect our SmartSuite account. To do this one time setup, we need to click Save Sign in and you're going to see a prompt to fill in your SmartSuite API details and your workspace ID. Now this all sounds really scary, but again, it's really not. And if you get stuck on either of these, SmartSuite's help articles are super easy to follow and walk you through each step. But I'm going to try my best to do it for you so you don't get stuck. To fill in the first field, we need to go back into our SmartSuite account and locate our API key. To do that, we can go into our profile settings, click on API key and locate the API key that it will scroll us right to. All we need to do is copy and paste this into our zapier field right here. All right, take a moment. Copy and paste. Once we do this, we're going to need the workspace ID and to find this, all you need to do is look at the URL of your SmartSuite account. So let's go back in here and locate in my own URL right here. Our workspace ID for this particular account is SM2PFOG0COOL. All we're going to do is copy that information and put that into this wizard here for Zapier. That's what's going to give Zapier the permission to connect to SmartSuite through our user Access Notice. If you're someone like me who just happened to publish your API key or publish your workspace ID through a video, you can change this information, particularly the API key, by clicking Destroy Token right here like I'll be doing after this video. However, once this is filled in, you can click Connect right here and Zapier is going to start crunching the numbers and making sure it's truly able to connect into your SmartSuite account. Once it loads, you'll see something like this happen where rather than that Connect button, you'll see a dropdown appear. Once you select the option, you will be able to move on to the next step by clicking Continue. Finally, we're here on the action phase where we can choose what exactly we're doing with that new record. Is it a new record created here or there? What should it look like? Let's get specific here. We want to type in the name of the solution we're going to create our record in. In this case, time off requests. If you're not sure which one this should be, look back at your destination and at the top, this is the name we are looking for. So in this case, time off requests, then I'm going to choose the app again. If you're not sure which one to choose, look up here. This is your app. That's what you're selecting. In this case, I've only got one option, so made my life easy. Ready to move on. From here, all of these fields start to pop up. And what this is is Zapier looking at SmartSuite and saying, okay, you want me to put things there, I get it, but there's a lot of places I could put things. All we need to do here is click on a given field in SmartSuite which shows up as a field in Zapier and tell Zapier what information goes where. In this case, I want to go back and remember. Remember all those fields that we created before where we highlighted certain things and said, hey, this means that those are the fields I want to populate inside of SmartSuite. So what I'm going to do is type in the words parse space output. Now that sounds like nonsense, but all that means is, hey, Zapier only give me options that relate to these highlighted areas and anything else you think might be relevant. So when I do that and I type in parse output, we see these things pop up. Look at these. Look familiar? Yes, because the first thing is the requested by. Remember, we identified this from the email. We're going to make that the request id, because request ID and everything else is the person's email. So let's be consistent. Next up, we've got other fields. Reasons for absence. Remember parse output? Didn't we create something for note? Right. The reason someone was leaving? We did. We called it requester's note. We'll call that here and put that into this field. Next up, we have status. Here's an interesting one where we don't actually have to map anything, meaning grab anything from the email. We know this is always going to be the same. Because we're receiving an email for a request, we know that this is always going to be submitted. So we're going to set that here so all things coming through the zap show up as submitted. But the last one we want to make sure we have is the parse output for the date range. Right now we have start of absence and end of absence as two different fields in SmartSuite. Yet when we did our email parser, we made them all just one big field for date requested. But for now, I'm not really going to worry about those finer points. We can fine tune those in the testing phase. I'm going to leave this as is for now and click Continue. Once we have all of this stuff set up, it's time to test it to see if it will actually bring our information from the email parser into SmartSuite. I'm going to go ahead and click Test Action and we'll have it move through when it's done spinning. You'll see something like this pop up where a record was sent to SmartSuite and you can go into SmartSuite to confirm this is all working. So let's go over there, check it out. We have something hey, look at that. We've got Layla requesting time off for the date. Now we do have a little bit of an issue with our date range coming in. To fix this, I really have two options. I can either go back to my parser and break things out so that they're one date at a time and they're two separate fields, or I can keep them as is and do some zapier magic by adding a formatter a formatting option here to then break it down into nicer formatting. Once I have those two pieces, or if I'm lazy, which I might be today, I can also just change smartsuite. So that way rather than looking at a specific date field that requires just one date, in this case I use a date range field or to be even lazier, a text field. If we are not ever going to report on these dates, we don't need a calendar view of time off. Then I'd probably go the text route of just having that stuff come into the request title or in the Dates Requested text field. Given the options available to me, and knowing that every so often we do have time off requests that are all over the place, meaning it's Monday, Thursday and Friday all in one big request. I don't think I'm going to be able to get it broken out into individual date fields. So for me I'm going to choose the text field option called Dates Requested. I'm going to then go back to my zap, locate my Action step and refresh these fields. This basically means tell Zapier to look for the changes in the custom fields available. When I click Refresh Fields, we should see our new field pop in. Then we can add our parse output of Dates Requested right here into our Dates Requested text field, which does not restrict us to a certain formatting or certain number of dates, and then click Continue retest action to see if our new version works better, and then we'll go back into zapier and just delete the fields we no longer need. And here we can see a new record was created in SmartSuite with that field in it, so we're good to go. But this whole step four of testing your zap could require some iteration, however long it takes you to test. Though, we do need to make sure we wrap up our journey here by giving this zap a descriptive name, maybe linking it back to the SOP you have and saying turn time off. Request emails Into Records in SmartSuite, turn on the zap itself so it's always working, it's always ready, and then test it out while everything is on, not using the test feature, but actually start forwarding old emails, old requests to make sure they come into SmartSuite in a format you like. If you are not happy with any of the results at this point in time, just know you can always turn this off and edit this app if you want to go back and modify steps or even add additional steps below it, such as maybe you want it to create a app in SmartSuite, maybe you wanted to create a calendar event for yourself. Whatever you want to do, you can add a lot of steps here, but we just want to make sure that this is working and ready to kind of set and forget so we can move on to the next step. For step five, all we're going to do is take the mailbox we created in zapier and add it to our contacts inside our email tool, whether that's Gmail, Outlook, something else. Just make sure that you take this email address and save it into your contacts directory. In this case, I'm going to go inside my Google Contacts, I'm going to add this email address and I'm going to give it a name that defines what this zapier mailbox is. For example, zapier Mailbox for time off requests. I'm going to take the link to where I set it up and put that in the notes in case I need to reference it later and then click Save. What this will allow me to do is easily when I receive these requests, forward them to this email address, or if I wanted to be fancy, take this contact and use it when creating a forwarding rule. For example, I could say every time an email matches this criteria, automatically forward it to this email address. Whether you want to make this step fully automated or slightly manual still, so you have that oversight. Either way, you're going to want to have a contact in your contact directory so you don't have to memorize this mailbox? Finally, we are at step number six where we're going to have SmartSuite pick off where Zapier left off. So if there is anything that needs to happen once a request comes into SmartSuite, we can use SmartSuite's automations to have additional steps occur. For example, we want to notify somebody if we want to have certain people assigned. Let's just go into Angela here. Maybe we always want to have the reviewer field be assigned to Layla as the default value. We can do that here using SmartSuite's default fields and automations. To learn more about these features, check out this video about SmartSuite above. But this would be kind of a bonus step if you wanted to keep automating from this point forward. Alright, so that is how we can take an email, parse out the important information and get that information into SmartSuite. For many people this will be overkill. You can probably go with a much simpler route of just forwarding those emails into SmartSuite. But for folks who want to break things down and put them into certain fields, doing this practice will give you some better data and have things broken down more in SmartSuite. So it's not just this big wall of text or this entire email going into one record. SmartDoc While my example today focused on automating HR data entry, you can use this exact same setup for any other specific kind of email alert or system that you'd like to connect. Just make sure you have a spot to put the information and a clear understanding of what those emails look like in a consistent formatting to create a mailbox. And you can wash, rinse and repeat this for any area of your business from accounts payable, receivable, client feedback, anything. If this tutorial was exciting for you, please do like and subscribe. And if you'd like to kick your smartsuite up a notch, check out the description below for our affiliate link where you can sign up and contact their support for some extra savings. And if you are someone that's interested in building human resource processes into SmartSuite, which hint hint, all of us really should check out this video next. It's a great breakdown on how to get started. Thanks so much for watching guys and until next time, enjoy the process.