Business card scanner for Google Sheets.

How it works

Somebody on your stand photographs a card with the CardParse app. The card is parsed into named fields, anything the parser is unsure about is flagged for a person to check rather than guessed at, and the contact appears in your dashboard.

A row appended to a spreadsheet, one per card, in the order they were scanned. The fields that make the journey are below.

Connecting it

Press connect, sign in to Google, and CardParse creates the spreadsheet in your own Drive. You never have to find a sheet ID or share anything with us.

Scanning works with no signal. Cards queue on the phone and upload themselves when the connection comes back, which matters more at a trade show than anywhere else: a hall full of people is a hall full of phones fighting over the same cell.

Automatically, or when you say so

Each destination is set to one or the other. Automatic means every card arrives within seconds of being scanned, with anything flagged for review held back until somebody confirms it. The alternative is that nothing leaves on its own: you select the contacts you want on the contacts table and press send, whenever you are ready.

Which one suits depends on the show. A stand qualifying as it goes usually wants to check before sending; a stand collecting as fast as it can usually does not.

Worth knowing

• We ask for one Google permission, and it is the narrow one. `drive.file` covers only files this application created, so CardParse can write to the sheet it made for you and cannot see anything else in your Drive.
• The sheet is yours. Rename it, move it, add columns to the right of ours, share it with the team. We only ever append.
• Columns are fixed by the mapping below and written by letter, so inserting a column in the middle of the sheet will move data into the wrong one. Add new columns at the end.