n8n Google Drive Invoice OCR to Sheets (Mistral)

Automatically convert Google Drive invoice PDFs into structured rows in Google Sheets using Mistral OCR

This n8n workflow watches your Google Drive “UPLOAD Invoices” folder for new invoice PDFs, extracts key invoice fields with Mistral OCR (free API keys available), and appends the results to Google Sheets—then moves the processed file to a “Processed Invoices” folder.

What this workflow does

• Monitors your Drive folder: Triggers every minute when a new file is created in the specified source Google Drive folder.
• Downloads the new PDF from Google Drive for processing.
• Extracts invoice text from the PDF, using Mistral OCR to improve extraction quality.
• Parses invoice details from the extracted content, identifying fields such as invoice number, issue date, due date, customer/seller, amounts, and days left to pay.
• Appends a new row to a target Google Sheets spreadsheet/tab with the extracted fields, and marks the invoice as unpaid.
• Prevents re-processing by moving the processed PDF to a Processed Invoices Google Drive folder.

Use cases

• SaaS operators centralizing incoming invoice PDFs from a shared Drive workflow.
• Automation engineers needing reliable invoice OCR-to-ERP-style field capture into Google Sheets.
• Teams that want quick invoice tracking (invoice number, due date, days left to pay) without manual data entry.

Technical details

• n8n nodes/workflow components: Code, Sticky Note, Google Drive, HTTP Request, Google Sheets, and file extraction.
• Integrations: Google Drive (OAuth2), Google Sheets (OAuth2).
• Mistral OCR: Uses three HTTP calls to Mistral with your Bearer token to extract text from PDFs.
• Setup requirements: Provide source/destination Google Drive folder IDs, target spreadsheet + sheet tab, ensure columns match written fields, and supply a Mistral API key for the OCR requests.

Tip: For best results, upload PDF invoices with consistent formatting (or use the included Mistral OCR HTTP requests to replace built-in PDF text extraction when needed).