n8n Workflow: Google Sheets Readiness & Gmail Approval Digest

Instant readiness checks and an approval digest from Google Sheets—optionally with a safe Gmail test send

This n8n workflow reads your Google Sheets tracker to calculate project readiness, identify missing assets and pending decisions, and generate a clean approval digest. In an explicitly approved mode, it can also run a controlled Gmail test send and log the delivery attempt to a Sheets ledger.

What this workflow does

• Manual execution: designed to run when you manually trigger it in n8n.
• Configuration guardrails: loads pilot settings and blocks execution if the target Google Sheets spreadsheet ID is not set.
• Reads required tabs: pulls data from the projects, items, decisions, and send_ledger tabs.
• Validates and computes readiness: checks IDs, dates, receipt timestamps, and applies version-specific approval rules to compute each project’s readiness plus an owner follow-up queue.
• Preview mode (default behavior): returns a readable summary (subject/body plus structured rows) without writing back to Sheets or sending email.
• Approved send-test mode: when explicitly enabled, appends a reservation to send_ledger, rereads Sheets to confirm nothing changed, then sends a single test email via Gmail.
• Ledger verification: records the Gmail result as sent or uncertain back into send_ledger and verifies the outcome exists in the ledger.

Use cases

• Generate an approval digest for SaaS operators tracking project asset readiness across versions.
• Spot missing deliverables and requested changes early by using your Sheets decisions as the source of truth.
• Safely validate email content and routing with a Gmail test send that is recorded in a ledger—before running real approvals externally.

Technical details

• Trigger: Manual Trigger
• Logic: if, code
• Email: Gmail (single test email in approved send-test mode)
• Data source: Google Sheets (OAuth2 on each Google Sheets node)
• Notes/UI: Sticky Note

Ideal for n8n workflow automation engineers and teams running approval processes backed by Google Sheets.