TimeCard automation from mobile phone

Help
1

I am working on a time sheet automation that would allow me to send in my hours worked from my phone to a bot that would take that info and log into my timecard for me. Any suggestions on how to send the bot my hours without interfering with the firewall? (some channels like google forms/excel online aren’t available from mobile work devices)

All suggestions would be welcome.

Basic outline would be:
1.) Reminder notification sent to my phone
2.) I reply to reminder with the number of hours
3.) Bot picks up reply and logs hours.

2

Hi @UiUser,

You could email yourself, either in a specific format or with an attached file.
Then let the robot access your email account, and search for the email, parse the information from it, and the paste it in your timecard.

How does that sound?

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3

You could send them to an email inbox that the bot has access to. Then the bot can check for new emails every so often and if they have a given keyword like timecard it could know to process the item.

You could integrate with a service like Twilio which would allow you to text the bot your hours.

If your phone is connected to your work network you could use a service like Postman to start the job via an api call.

4

Email is definitely feasible…do you have any suggestions on how to format data or how to extract the data from the email in a simple way? the fields being submitted are: day, project name, hours.

5

If we were to use a service like twilio how would the bot gain the hour information?

6

For both email and twilio you just need to standardize your inputs so the bot knows what to look for.
Something like this could work:

Name: UiUser
Project: Project A
Hours: 7:30 - 16:30

Then you have the bot read the text/email and split the contents by newline into an array.

timesheetData[0] = “Name: UiUser”
timesheetData[1] = “Project: Project A”
timesheetData[2] = “Hours: 7:30 - 16:30”

From there you can trim off the labels "Name: ", "Project: ", and "Hours: " to get your data.

As long as you are consistent in how you give information to the bot then you can reliably program it to handle it a certain way every time.

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7

This all sounds great! If I were to do the text version is there a twilio connector or UiPath activity set that I can download to interact with twilio?

8

You should be able to search ‘Twilio’ in the package manager and it should bring up the package. I’ve only used it in passing once so I’m not the best expert, but it seemed fairly simple. You just need to set up an account on their website.