New at FileDrop: Contacts, PDF tracking, and Automations Recepies

Here is what’s new at FileDrop for this week.

Don’t forget to review the previous announcement and updates.

• Automations for FileDrop Forms
• Tables updates and fixes
• PDF Links Design Update

FileDrop’s tools now talk to each other. Contacts is a real address book you can type into. Shared PDFs can trigger automations the moment someone opens them. Automations can read the text and tables out of uploaded documents. And the people who open your files end up in your contacts automatically.

Contacts

Contacts used to be a list FileDrop assembled from your form activity. You could look at it, but not change it. Now it is a real record.

Adding someone

Contacts → Add contact. Email is the only required field; name, phone and stage are optional.

This is the one that matters if enquiries reach you by phone or in person — you no longer have to send someone a form just to get them into the system.

Notes

Open any contact and use the note box. Notes appear in that person’s timeline alongside their form submissions, file requests and PDF opens, so the whole history is on one page.

Stages

Every account starts with New → Contacted → Qualified → Won → Lost. These are just a starting point — use Manage stages on the Contacts page to rename, recolour, reorder, add or delete them:

• A tutoring centre: Enquiry → Tour booked → Trial lesson → Enrolled
• An agency: Lead → Proposal sent → Client

Mark one stage as Default and new contacts created by a form submission, a PDF open or an automation land there. Deleting a stage keeps the contacts in it — they simply lose the stage.

Filter the contact list by stage from the dropdown at the top.

If you don’t want stages, ignore them. Pick No stage when adding someone and the field never gets in your way. They only become load-bearing if you want scheduled requests to target a group.

Where contacts come from

Everyone is matched on their email address, so the same person is never duplicated no matter how many ways they reach you.

Following up with a whole group at once

Scheduled requests can now target a contact stage instead of a typed list of addresses.

Forms → Scheduled requests → New, then switch the recipient picker from Type addresses to Contact stage.

The important part: the list is worked out fresh every time the request sends. Set up “chase everyone still at Enquiry every 3 days” once, and anyone who moves into that stage next week gets chased too — without you touching it. Anyone who responds and moves on drops out automatically.

Combine it with the existing retry settings (retry up to N times, N days apart, stop after they respond) and the whole follow-up sequence runs itself.

Capped at 100 recipients per run.

Knowing when someone opens your PDF

Shared PDFs can now start an automation.

Automations → New, pick Shared PDF Activity as the source, then choose:

Pick a specific file, or leave it on Any shared PDF to watch everything you share.

What you can do with it

Anything the automation builder already offers — Slack, email, Google Chat, a webhook, an Airtable record, a new sheet row, or adding the reader to your contacts.

Details you can use in the message

So a Slack message like:

{viewer_email} just opened "{file_title}" and spent {time_spent_seconds}s on it

Refreshing the page doesn’t re-notify you.

Note: {viewer_email} is only known when the shared file has Require email verification turned on. Without it, opens are recorded anonymously.

Turning PDF readers into contacts

Anyone who requests access to or opens a shared PDF is now added to your contacts automatically, tagged as a PDF share contact.

Their opens and downloads show up on their contact timeline, so you can see the full story in one place: sent the intake form → they submitted → opened the proposal twice → downloaded it.

Keeping the gathered emails in a table

Previously the only way to get access emails out was a one-off CSV download. Now you can connect a live table instead.

Any file with Require email verification turned on now shows a line under it:

Collecting viewer emails · 12 gathered      Download CSV   Keep in a table

Keep in a table creates a table that updates itself, with:

Once connected, the same line tells you where the addresses are going and gives you Open table and Stop updating. Because it is a normal FileDrop table, you can share, embed or export it — handing a colleague a read-only link instead of emailing spreadsheets around.

The CSV export still works exactly as before. Turning the sync off leaves the table and its data in place.

Available on Business Plus and Max, same as the CSV export.

Reading what people upload

Two new automation actions turn uploaded documents into usable data.

Read text (OCR)

Adds the document’s text as {ocr_text}, which any later action in the same automation can use — email it to yourself, write it to a sheet, push it to Airtable.

Engine has two settings:

• Balanced — fast, good for clean scans and typed documents. Use this by default.
• Most accurate — reads handwriting and messy scans, detects the language on its own, slower on large files. Use it when Balanced returns nonsense.

Extract table (OCR)

Pulls a real table out of a document — an invoice, a price list, a timesheet — and gives you:

• {ocr_table_markdown} — the whole table, readable in an email
• {ocr_table_col_1}, {ocr_table_col_2}, … — the first data row split into cells, so you can map them to sheet or table columns

This always uses the most accurate engine, because it is the only one that understands table structure. No setting to get wrong.

Which file gets read

Leave File to read blank and it uses the file attached to whatever triggered the automation — the form upload, or the shared PDF. Otherwise give it a URL, or a column that holds one, like {column:C}.

A worked example

“When a client uploads an invoice, pull out the line items and log them.”

1. Source: Form Submission, pick your upload form
2. Action 1: Extract table (OCR)
3. Action 2: New row, mapping {submitter_email} to column A, {ocr_table_col_1} to B, {ocr_table_col_2} to C

Three steps, no third-party tools.

Starting from a recipe

The automation builder now opens with Start from a recipe — prefilled starting points you can edit afterwards:

• Tell me when a client opens a document
• Email me on every download
• Add document readers to contacts
• New client onboarding
• Read what clients upload
• Pull tables out of uploaded invoices

You only see recipes you can actually run. If you have never shared a PDF, the PDF recipes are hidden; if Google Drive isn’t connected, the ones needing Drive are hidden too.

Pick one, give it a name, review the steps, save.

Importing an existing list

Contacts → Import CSV. Pick your file, confirm which columns hold the email, name and phone, and import. FileDrop reads the header row and guesses the mapping for you.

• People you already have are updated, not duplicated — matched on email
• Rows without a valid email address are skipped and counted
• The same address twice in one file counts once
• Up to 5 MB and 5,000 rows per file

You can drop everyone into a stage on the way in, or leave it as No stage.

If you already work in Tables

Contacts → Tables holds two optional extras for people who use the Tables feature:

• Bring an existing table into contacts — promote a table you already have, choosing which column holds the email address.
• Mirror contacts into a table — a read-only copy of your contacts as a table, if you want to share or embed the list. Your contacts stay the source of truth.

Neither is needed for a normal import. For a plain spreadsheet, use Import CSV.

Smaller fixes

• Email and Phone column types in Tables now work correctly. Previously choosing either produced an error.

This is a small update on what we delivered in the last update.