Connect, Alert,
Automate

It was the last line of the brief. An afterthought. It is the most interesting sentence in the document.

1. Go to console.cloud.google.com
2. Click the project dropdown, top left, next to "Google Cloud"
3. New Project → name it stock-alerts
4. Wait ~20 seconds. Make sure the dropdown now says stock-alerts.

1. In the search bar at the top, type Google Sheets API
2. Click the result (it's a product page, not a settings page)
3. Press the big blue Enable button
4. Wait. The page will reload into a dashboard with zero traffic on it.

1. Search for Service Accounts (it lives under "IAM & Admin")
2. Create service account
3. Name it stock-bot. Skip the optional "grant access" steps — those are about Google Cloud, not about your sheet.
4. Done. Now copy its email address. It looks like this:

Copy it somewhere. You need it in step 5, and step 5 is the one everybody forgets.

1. Click your new stock-bot service account
2. Go to the Keys tab
3. Add key → Create new key → JSON
4. A file downloads. Move it into your project folder and rename it service-account.json.

{
  "type": "service_account",
  "project_id": "stock-alerts-472913",
  "private_key_id": "a1b2c3...",
  "private_key": "-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----\nMIIEv...
  "client_email": "stock-bot@stock-alerts-472913
                   .iam.gserviceaccount.com",
  "token_uri": "https://oauth2.googleapis.com/token"
}

Note client_email. That's the robot's address — the one you need in step 5. It was in the file all along.

1. Open your Google Sheet
2. Click Share, top right — the same button you'd use for a colleague
3. Paste the robot's email: stock-bot@…iam.gserviceaccount.com
4. Give it Editor (we'll write report tabs back). Viewer is enough if you only read.
5. Untick "notify people". The robot does not read its email.

1. Create a new Google Sheet called Stock Alerts
2. Rename the first tab to movements. File → Import → movements.csv.
3. Add a second tab, sku_master. Import sku_master.csv.
4. Share it with the robot (step 5, if you haven't).
5. Copy the sheet's ID out of the URL — the long string between /d/ and /edit.

Connect an MCP server for Google Sheets to Claude, and you stop writing code to ask questions. You just ask.

It noticed the oak plank caveat. Because you're there, in the loop, reading it.

Email is where information goes to wait. In Thailand, the team's real nervous system is a LINE group, open all day, on everyone's phone.

The alert doesn't need to be seen. It needs to arrive where people already are, and where somebody can immediately reply "already ordered, arriving Tuesday."

GitHub has a vault. You paste the secret in once; the running job can read it; nobody — including you — can ever read it back out.

1. Repo → Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions
2. New repository secret
3. Name: GOOGLE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_JSON
   Value: the entire contents of service-account.json
4. Repeat for GMAIL_ADDRESS and GMAIL_APP_PASSWORD

name: Weekly stock alerts

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 11 * * 5"     # ← review THIS line
  workflow_dispatch:          # ← lets you run it by hand

jobs:
  run:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v5
        with:
          python-version: "3.12"
      - run: pip install -r requirements.txt
      - name: Write credentials from the vault
        run: echo '${{ secrets.GOOGLE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_JSON }}' > service-account.json
      - name: Run the rules
        env:
          GMAIL_ADDRESS: ${{ secrets.GMAIL_ADDRESS }}
          GMAIL_APP_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.GMAIL_APP_PASSWORD }}
        run: python rules.py

1. Repo → Actions tab
2. Choose Weekly stock alerts
3. Run workflow → the button that workflow_dispatch gave you
4. Watch the log scroll. Wait for the email.
5. Open the email on your phone — that's where it'll be read.