🔬 Scan business cards to Google Sheets and iPhone contacts with Telegram and easybits
⚡ 126 views · 🔬 Document Extraction & Analysis
Description
What This Workflow Does
Snap a photo of a business card – or a whole stack laid out on a desk – and get back a Google Sheets row for every contact plus a .vcf file you can tap to add directly to your iPhone
Built for the moment you come back from a conference with 30 cards in your pocket. Lay them out, take one photo, and your contacts are in your phone before you finish your coffee.
How it works
- Telegram bot receives a photo of one or more business cards
- easybits Extractor reads every card in the image and returns structured contact data (name, title, company, email, phone, website, address, notes)
- Deduplication check compares each new contact against existing rows in the sheet – already-saved contacts are filtered out automatically
- Google Sheets gets a new row for every new contact
- Individual vCard files are sent back via Telegram, one per new contact – tap any of them to add directly to your phone
What you need
- An n8n instance (Cloud or self-hosted)
- A Telegram bot (free, takes 2 minutes to create via @BotFather)
- A Google Sheet with these column headers:
timestamp·name·title·company·email·phone·website·address·notes - An easybits account at easybits.tech – your Pipeline ID and API Key from the pipeline details page
Setting up the easybits Extractor in n8n
The easybits Extractor is a verified community node, so it’s available on n8n Cloud out of the box – just search for “easybits Extractor” in the node panel and start using it. No installation needed.
On a self-hosted instance, go to Settings → Community Nodes → Install and enter: @easybits/n8n-nodes-extractor
Once added to your canvas, you only need two values from your easybits pipeline details page:
- Pipeline ID
- API Key
Leave Input Type on Binary Files (the default) – it reads the photo binary directly from the Telegram node, no encoding step needed.
Dedup logic
Contacts are matched by email when available, otherwise by name + company. If a contact already exists in the sheet, it won’t be re-added or sent back as a vCard – only genuinely new contacts come through.
🔗 Nodes Used
Google Sheets, Telegram, Telegram Trigger
📥 Import
Download workflow.json and import into n8n:
Workflow menu → Import from File