n8n Dropbox → Google Drive Accounting Close Automation

Automate Dropbox → Google Drive month-end accounting closes (with an OpenAI-checked document checklist)

This n8n Dropbox → Google Drive Accounting Close Automation workflow mirrors your recent month folders from Dropbox into a shared Google Drive archive, then twice a month it uses OpenAI to recognize required accounting documents, emails you a checklist, and prepares a Gmail draft for your accountant when the month is complete.

What this workflow does

• Runs on schedule or manually: daily at 07:50 and on the 5th and 12th at 09:00, with a manual option. It branches into mirroring, month-end checking, or error notification.
• Mirrors Dropbox folders to Google Drive: lists folders under your configured Dropbox root, selects only recent months, creates any missing year/month folders in Google Drive, and uploads files that aren’t already present.
• Checks required documents for a specific month: reads document rules from an n8n Data Table. If no active rules exist, it emails instructions (and can optionally insert example rows into the table).
• Detects new/changed candidates: compares Dropbox files against prior results stored in n8n Data Tables, then selects only new or changed files to analyze.
• Uses OpenAI to classify documents: downloads candidate files, extracts text from the first pages of PDFs, and sends context to OpenAI to identify document type, period, issuer, and confidence using structured output.
• Creates review outputs: compiles missing items and flags items needing review (duplicates, empty/broken PDFs, wrong month, low-confidence matches), then emails you a checklist via Gmail and creates a Gmail draft to your accountant with a document index when the month is complete.

Use cases

• Accounting close teams who want reliable Dropbox archive synchronization into Google Drive.
• SaaS operators or automation engineers running recurring month-end document validation with human review.
• Teams maintaining an n8n Data Table of required documents and periodically re-checking for new uploads.

Technical details

• Integrations: Dropbox, Google Drive, Gmail, OpenAI
• n8n nodes/logic: if, set, code, gmail, filter, switch
• Data management: uses n8n Data Tables for document rules and to store prior file comparison results