[Approval] Add approval email's link to Team sheet in Timesheets

[andiechu]

problem

We are manually approving freelancers to work on client projects. It's not scalable.

solution

automate the manual process (see comment)

requirements

• take a screenshot of approval email and save it to the freelancer's personal plan folder
• add the approval email's link to the Timesheet

[ancagabriela]

For adding approval email to the [Team] sheet in the project timesheet we need to have a user (an email) that receives all the emails related to approval rates. That will mean we receive all the emails in one place so we can search in the inbox.
So far [email protected] and [email protected] are just groups forwarding the emails to other user emails.

Steps to do:

• create a user that receives all Coderbunker approval emails
• search for emails that contain " APPROVAL NEEDED: {company name} Rates Approval for Coderbunker's freelancers" in the subject line.
• detect that the email contains a reply with the "approved" word on the body of the email
• in the {client} Freelancers Approvals folder, save the body of the email as a pdf
• for each freelancer name in the "to" field, take the link of the folder and add it to the {client} timesheet [Team sheet] on the approval column
• add Validity date based on the date the freelancer was approved on the project

notes

• @Moomoo14 spoke with Kate, and determined the sender field is not reliable, unpredictable. Don't use.
• example of {client} Freelancers Approvals folder

[Moomoo14]

using the client name in the Subject of the email require to pull the name of the client from a location as they are different for each client.
To this, a file should have or will have to store the clients name in waiting list for approval, when the approval request is sent.

"is there a file or location i can pull the client name ?" @andiechu @ancagabriela

[ancagabriela]

all the clients are added here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xrhJe8fXcO5JuV6ATGwOtyWyQzODYsHhaeHj_MFuOKo/edit#gid=249292910

[Moomoo14]

" take a screenshot of approval email and save it to the freelancer's personal plan folder" -- it will be very complicated to push the approval to every team member folder.
Isn't there a better solution to store the data and link the concerned people to it? -- @andiechu
Recommendation:
-- It is easier to just push the document containing the approval email to the client folder and paste that link to the timesheet

[rngadam]

A more reliable way to do this would be to set a replyTo in the source email with an additional identifier postfix to the user name:

[email protected]

(this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Subaddressing)

and extracting the approval related to that id.

relying on such user inputs in both the email subject and the body is going to be unreliable.

the information of what is getting approved is then kept on our side.

[rngadam]

other alternative solution and perhaps more straightforward is just to move directly to a GAS-hosted web interface (you can create it, host it as HTML in a GAS project and interact with your own API on the server) where a rendered image / PDF of the proposal is provided.

because the client needs to be authenticated with a valid google account, this counts as electronic signature.