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Scan business cards to Google Sheets and iPhone contacts with Telegram and easybits

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Created by: Felix || easybits
Felix

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Last update 5 hours ago

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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

  1. Telegram bot receives a photo of one or more business cards
  2. easybits Extractor reads every card in the image and returns structured contact data (name, title, company, email, phone, website, address, notes)
  3. Deduplication check compares each new contact against existing rows in the sheet – already-saved contacts are filtered out automatically
  4. Google Sheets gets a new row for every new contact
  5. 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.