Automate adding records for monthly summarization

Hi ​@MilhoanDesign,

In your video, you mentioned that you already have an automation that copies & pastes the Account ID formula into the Account linked record field.

You would do the exact same thing for your monthly summaries.

In your transactions table, you would create a formula that results in the value that you want to appear as the primary field value in your summary table. (Right now, it looks like you want it to say the Account ID with the month and year added to the end.)

Then, while still within your transactions table, your automation would copy & paste this new formula into the linked record field that links to your summary table.

However, the trick to making this work is that you can’t have the primary field in your summary table be a formula field. Your primary field would need to be changed to a single line text field.

That’s the key to making this work! :)

(Alternatively, if you want to learn how to use a 3rd-party automation tool to automate this entire process before the data even shows up into Airtable, you could use Make to automate the CSV import and populate all of the records in all of the linked tables for you, and then the data will show up in Airtable already ready-to-go. I demonstrate some of this on this Airtable podcast episode.) 

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

​@ScottWorld Thank you very much for the wonderful explanation and for the Make integration idea, I really appreciate the help! I also appreciate how much you contribute to the community! 

​@MilhoanDesign 

Thank you so much for your kind words, and you’re welcome!! 😃

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

​@ScottWorld What I think I am going to do now that you mentioned Make, is upload .csv files to a Google Drive folder, convert to Google Sheet, run a script that filters and groups, then send the correctly formatted data to Airtable via Make. 

​@MilhoanDesign 

That’s an awesome idea! Love it! 😀

You might not even need to run a script, because Make offers tons of functions & tools that would likely enable you to do all of that within Make itself. However, the big downside here is that it takes a REALLY LONG TIME to learn how to do all of that in Make, because it’s such a complex platform.

I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. And I give a lot of demonstrations in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make. And in this post, I show how to instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

This is really awesome, ​@ScottWorld I can’t thank you enough! I will check these out and start on my Make learning journey! 

​@MilhoanDesign You’re welcome!! :)

Summary:  Need to consolidate records that have a date value for monthly summaries based on company name

Does this look right?

If so, I’ve set it up here for you to check out

And here’s the formula:

{Account Check} &'-'&
DATETIME_FORMAT(Date, 'MMMMYY')

I reckon you might want to do the manual copy paste with the header click instead of using automations given how many records you’ve got, and to do that you’d:

1. Click the field header of the formula field to select all the text, then copy it
2. Click the field header of the linked field, paste

​@TheTimeSavingCo Thank you for the reply and I apologize for the delayed message. Your solution is great and very simple, which I love! What I actually ended up doing is creating a Google App Script that summarizes each account and then sends it to Airtable. This really cuts down on the automations and is easier on the end user since they only have to upload the csv file to Google Drive - App Script and Make do the heavy lifting.