Logistics & Delivery Teams: Extract Tracking Numbers from Shipping Labels into Sheets

If your team handles dozens (or hundreds) of shipments a day, you already know the painful part isn’t printing labels—it’s everything that comes after: copying tracking numbers, carrier names, order references, service types, weights, and ship dates into a spreadsheet so the rest of the operation can move.

That manual step is slow, error-prone, and honestly… unnecessary.

With Img2Sheet, you can turn shipping labels (photos or screenshots) into clean, structured rows in Google Sheets, using AI extraction guided by your own structure—not a generic “OCR text dump”.

The common problem: labels are messy, spreadsheets need structure

Shipping labels look consistent at first, but in reality they vary:

  • Different carriers (DHL, FedEx, UPS, local couriers)
  • Different label layouts depending on shipping platform
  • Tracking number formats that change by service or region
  • Extra text blocks and barcodes that confuse basic OCR

Classic OCR tends to return a wall of text. Then someone still has to hunt for the tracking number and paste it into the right column.

AI + a defined structure flips that workflow:

  • You decide what fields matter
  • You define how they should be written to the sheet
  • The extraction outputs exactly that

The workflow: define once, extract forever

1) Create a “Shipping Label” structure

You define columns with:

  • Label (column name)
  • Type (text or number)
  • Prompt (what to extract exactly)

Example structure for logistics teams:

  • Tracking Number (text) — “Extract the tracking number (no spaces).”
  • Carrier (text) — “Identify the carrier name (e.g., DHL, UPS, FedEx).”
  • Service Type (text) — “Extract the service level (Express, Standard, etc.).”
  • Order / Reference ID (text) — “Extract order number or reference if present.”
  • Recipient Name (text) — “Extract recipient full name.”
  • Destination City (text) — “Extract destination city.”
  • Destination Country (text) — “Extract destination country.”
  • Weight (number) — “Extract package weight as a number.”
  • Ship Date (text) — “Extract the shipment/label date if shown.”

You can keep it minimal (just tracking + carrier) or go full operations mode.

2) Upload a label image for that structure

Your team snaps a photo, uploads a screenshot, or drops exported label images.

3) Get structured rows in Google Sheets

The extracted output is inserted into Google Sheets exactly in the order and format of your structure, so your spreadsheet stays clean and consistent.

Why AI extraction beats basic OCR for shipping labels

Shipping labels are filled with distractions: barcodes, repeated numbers, routing codes, long addresses, and carrier-specific templates.

Instead of “reading everything”, AI uses your prompts to understand:

  • which number is the tracking number
  • whether “Reference” is a customer ref or your internal order id
  • how to normalize formats (remove spaces, keep letters, preserve leading zeros)
  • where to look even when the label layout changes

That means fewer mistakes and far less cleanup.

Use cases logistics teams love

  • Daily shipment log: auto-build a spreadsheet of all outgoing packages
  • Customer support tracking: tracking numbers instantly searchable by order/reference
  • Courier reconciliation: compare shipped vs billed shipments using structured data
  • Returns workflows: extract return label tracking numbers into a returns sheet
  • Multi-carrier operations: one standardized sheet even across many label formats

Privacy & security by design

Two important points if you’re handling customer data:

  • No file links — we don’t provide public file URLs.
  • Files are removed immediately after extraction — nothing sits around waiting to be accessed later.

You keep the structured data in your Google Sheet, and the source files are not retained.

Getting started (fast)

  1. Create a “Shipping Labels” structure once
  2. Share it with your ops team
  3. Start uploading labels and watch rows appear in your sheet

If you want, create multiple structures:

  • “Outgoing Labels”
  • “Return Labels”
  • “Proof of Delivery”
  • “International Shipments (with customs fields)”

Each structure stays consistent and reusable.