[TriLUG] Extracting data from emails

[Bill Farrow via TriLUG]

Hey everyone,
Over the past year I have been working on automating more things in my
life. My latest focus has been on paying bills and tracking expenses.
I'm inherently cautious and don't like the idea of giving a third
party access to my bank account and I settled on different solution:
email.

First step was to configure my credit cards to send an email
notifications for every single purchase.
Step two was to parse and extract the info from these emails and keep
a running total. After a couple of failed attempts, I came across this
blog post, and everything fell into place:
  https://blog.gsmart.in/parse-and-extract-data-from-gmail-to-google-sheets/

The end result is google script that runs every hour to scan my gmail
for new credit card purchases, and append the data to a google
spreadsheet. Do a pivot table and group by month, and I get a nice
monthly spend breakdown.


Bill