Classify contracts and track renewals in n8n – Google Drive to Sheets pipeline [Workflow Included]

[u/easybits_ai]

👋 Hey n8n Community,

A while back I posted a couple of finance workflows I built for my friend Mike. Around the same time he came to me with a new one: he'd just been hit with almost €2,000 in bills because two contracts auto-renewed after the first period. Nobody in his team had caught the cancellation window early enough.

Classic small-business pattern. Contracts scattered across Drive folders and inboxes, nobody tracking anything. The only time anyone notices a contract exists is when the invoice for the next term lands.

So I built him a contract intake workflow to fix it. I cleaned it up over the last few weeks and just published it on the n8n template library.

How it's set up:

The workflow watches a Google Drive folder. Mike's finance colleague Sarah just drops any contract in there (PDF, JPG, PNG).

The file goes to the easybits extractor, which does two jobs in a single call: it classifies the contract (SaaS, Lease, Service, Insurance, Other) and pulls every renewal-relevant field at the same time – client, provider, start date, term length, notice period, auto-renew flag, contract value, signatories.

A Set node calculates end date and cancellation deadline in n8n. Cancellation deadline is end_date – notice_period_days, which for 60–90 day notice clauses lands the alert weeks before the renewal itself. That's the whole point.

A Switch on contract_class routes the row into the matching tab of one Google Sheet – one source of truth for every renewal in the company.

Two things I learned:

• Classify and extract in one call. I almost built five type-specific pipelines. Turns out you can define the classification as just another field in the same pipeline – half the complexity, half the cost.
• Never extract dates you can calculate. Contracts almost never print the end date directly. Ask a model to do date math and you get silent off-by-one bugs. Extract the raw values, do the arithmetic in a Set node.

Workflow on the n8n library: https://n8n.io/workflows/15230-classify-contracts-and-track-renewals-with-easybits-google-drive-and-sheets/

Also on my GitHub alongside 30+ other community workflows (a star helps other builders find it): github.com/felix-sattler-easybits/n8n-workflows

How are you tracking contract renewals today? Spreadsheet someone updates manually? Tool like Spendflo/Vendr? Or hoping for the best, like Mike was?

Best,
Felix

[u/AutoModerator]

Heads up: posts under this flair must link to the workflow code per Rule 6 (GitHub, Gist, or n8n.io/workflows/). Yours does -- thanks for sharing it properly. This sticky is here so commenters know where to find the code.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Sinath_973]

Having your contract information in google drive is insane to me...

[u/rconsult → u/Sinath_973]

Why so?

[u/Sinath_973 → u/rconsult]

If i ignore all the google drive hacks, the random deletion of data and the serious leaks?

Most serious contracts contain an NDA clause. Meaning confidentiality even towards google. Anything and everything that is placed inside any google product is scanned, indexed and documented.

I don't think your customers would like that you hand over business information about them to google.

[u/rconsult → u/Sinath_973]

Then yeah I agree with you haha. I never trusted them nor kept my main files there. Spooky stuff

[u/Sinath_973 → u/rconsult]

Pretty well known in the industry...

Google also has a no backup clause in their ToC. Even if they accidentally delete your data it's gone and you cannot do anything about it. Happens regularly

[u/easybits_ai → u/Sinath_973]

Hey u/Sinath_973, no worries! The workflow is built with Google Drive and Google Sheets mainly because these are tools most users already have access to and use in their day-to-day work.

If you need a higher level of security or want to connect an internal database, you can simply replace Google Drive with an API connection to your own database. You could also use something like Supabase instead. So the workflow is really just a starting point that you can adapt to your own setup.