Contract Risk Review n8n Workflow: Drive to Gmail Approval

Drive Contract Approvals from Google Drive PDFs—With Gmail “Send & Wait” Routing

This Contract Risk Review n8n workflow automatically watches a Google Drive folder for new contract PDFs, analyzes the text with OpenAI, then routes approvals via Gmail to the right reviewer based on contract value and policy risk—logging outcomes to Google Sheets.

What this workflow does

• Monitors a Google Drive folder every minute for newly created files.
• Validates and processes PDFs: checks the file is a PDF, downloads it, and extracts contract text.
• Uses OpenAI for structured contract analysis (model: gpt-4o-mini) to return JSON containing key contract fields and clause indicators.
• Applies company policy rules to compute missing required clauses, risk flags, a risk score, and an approval route.
• Sends approval requests via Gmail using an approval-style “send and wait” flow, routing to Legal, Finance, or a Department Manager based on the extracted contract value and risk.
• Captures the decision: waits for the recipient to approve or decline, then appends the final outcome to Google Sheets (approved and rejected records).

Use cases

• Streamline contract intake by having legal/finance reviews triggered the moment a contract PDF is uploaded.
• Reduce manual triage: automatically route contracts using OpenAI-extracted fields and policy-based risk scoring.
• Maintain an audit trail by logging approval results into Google Sheets for tracking and reporting.

Technical details

• Integrations: Google Drive, OpenAI (gpt-4o-mini), Gmail (send & wait approvals), Google Sheets.
• Workflow nodes / logic: if, set, code, gmail, switch, sticky note.
• Setup highlights: configure the Drive folder ID to watch, add OpenAI credentials, set Gmail recipient emails, and provide the Sheets spreadsheet/tab to append results.