Send mail to records in Google Sheet and update column status and response

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1

Hello! I just signed up to Parabola.io as I’m looking for a solution to automate my company’s workflow.
Here’s the flow:

• We have a list of records in Google Sheets. Let’s call those records TASKS.
• Every column is a different attribute of this TASK. Two of them are OWNER and STATUS.
• For each new TASK (manually added), there will be OWNER assigned manually. Base STATUS is “empty” which means it’s an open TASK.

Now, what I want to do:
• For every new TASK with OWNER, I need Parabola.io to send an email to the OWNER asking if he’s accepting the TASK. I need a STATUS change into “Send”.
• In the email, there have to be two buttons: Accept or Decline.
• If OWNER clicks Accept, STATUS changes into “Accepted”
• If OWNER clicks Decline, STATUS changes into “Declined” and clears the OWNER.
• If OWNER does not click anything within 48hours, STATUS changes into “Declined” and clears the OWNER.

Is it possible to do such a thing in Parabola.io?

2

Hi @Kamil_Zowczak - Welcome to Parabola! Thanks for posting about your workflow.

It’s an interesting use case, but I have a few concerns about whether Parabola will be able to help:

  1. Parabola flows can be run on a schedule, manually, or via a webhook (which is currently a beta feature). If you decide to set your flow on a schedule, we can check for any new tasks with owner and send them an email.
  2. Parabola emails cannot have any custom buttons so we wouldn’t be able to track if someone clicked Accept or Decline. You’ll need to find another service that can help you with this emailing part. Whatever service you choose will need to be able to update the Google Sheet STATUS column with Accepted or Declined.
  3. For the last two bullets, Parabola can check for any rows where STATUS column is Declined or empty after 48 hours of sending the email and clear out the owner.
  4. One more thing to note is that Google Sheets only supports the ability to either append or overwrite to a Sheet. For your use case, we would need to overwrite the whole sheet with updated statuses rather than being able to update specific rows and cells.

I hope this information helps as you continue looking for a solution that’s right for your company. I’m afraid Parabola might not be the best solution to help you with this particular use case, but let me know if there’s anything else we can help you with!