An n8n workflow that saves 11 hours a week
A 14-person practice, hundreds of documents arriving by email every week. The sorting was done by hand by two people. This is the anatomy of the workflow that replaced it — without taking the decision away from anyone.
Intake: one email, one document, one record
The workflow listens to a shared mailbox. Every attachment is saved to Drive with a normalised name and creates a record row with date, sender and status. Before there is any AI in the process there is already a trail: that is what makes it auditable later.
Without an intake record there is no reliable workflow — only automation nobody can explain.
Classification: the model proposes, it does not decide
The document is classified by type and urgency, with a mandatory confidence field. Above the threshold it goes to the right folder and the right person; below it, it drops into a human review queue with the proposal already filled in.
Every AI step returns a proposal and a confidence level — never an irreversible action.
Extraction: only the fields somebody uses
Six fields are extracted, not twenty: client, reference, dates, amount, deadline and owner. Each one goes into the spreadsheet the team already used, which removed the need for new training and avoided a parallel system.
Extract only what feeds an existing decision. The rest is work that pretends to be work.
Errors and maintenance: the workflow says when it fails
Any error raises an alert in the team channel with the document in question and a button to reprocess it. In three months there were nine failures, all from outside — corrupted files and new formats.
A workflow with no alerts looks fine until the day you find out it stopped a week ago.
The result, measured on the same task
- 11 hours a week given back to the two people who were sorting by hand.
- Average time to reach the right owner: from 6 hours to 12 minutes.
- Zero documents lost since it went into production — it used to be three or four a month.
- Two weeks to build, one week of daily supervision, then occasional maintenance.
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