Automate Assigning People to Record

Does this look right?  If so I’ve set it up here for you to check out

The idea is to use a formula field to set up the order, and so in the ‘Next person’ field this is the formula:

SWITCH(
  Person,
  'Jerry', 'Elaine',
  'Elaine', 'Cosmo',
  'Cosmo', 'Jerry'
)

The automation then uses a view that’s sorted by the latest created time with the limit of finding one record, effectively finding us the latest created record:

And the ‘Update record’ step uses the value from the ‘Next person’ field from the found record and pastes it in:

Not entirely sure whether this will fit your workflow tho, let me know if there’re any issues and I’ll see what I can do!

Hi ​@MeaganEdwards,

when you say “assign” do you mean insert a Linked Record or do you really want to insert a User Object from Airtable? 

I setup something similar for a client who wanted to distribute leads evenly.

We had our first table - Leads.
This table was linked to our second table - Sales People.

On this second table I created a column called “# new Leads” which was the amount of linked records (column type = count).
 

Then I setup a new table containing only one record. This one record is linked to all Sales People (second table).

Then I did a lookup column in the third table, restricted the output to only the last record and sorted by “# new Leads” 9 ->1.
This way I will always see the Sales Person with the least amount of new leads.

In my case a Make Scenario inserted this Sales Person as a Linked Record into the Leads Table but you can also do so by using an Automation in Airtable :)

I’m curios to see how other people solved this but maybe this already helps a little bit!

Best,
Richard

Hey ​@MeaganEdwards,

Absolutely. You have multiple ways in which to set this “round-robin” automation. Let’s assume that what you need to assign are tasks.
I would suggest you do the following:

Schema:

1. Create a Tasks table
2. Create a Team Members table
3. Create a linked record field on the Tasks table, linked to Team Members (Airtable will automatically create the backlink for you)
4. On the Team Members table create a Count field type, that should count the amount of records linked on the Tasks linked record field (which again, was created automatically for you).
5. On the Team Members table create a grid new view called Sorted by Task Count, and sort it by Task count lowest to biggest (in this way, the member with the lowest count of tasks is shown at the top)
-see screenshot below (more on Airtable’s Count Fields here)

 

Automation:

Trigger: When a record is created in Tasks table
Find Records: on the Team Members table, based on view: “Sorted by Task Count” -make sure to limit the amount of records being used form such found records to 1 -see screenshot below. (this will bring the team member with the lowest count of tasks assigned to him)
Update record: Update the record from the Tasks table which triggered the automation to have the record id of the found record from the previous step on the field “Team Members”


Trigger:

Find Records:

Update:

Feel free to reach out if you need any help setting this up! I’d be happy to hop on a call and show you around.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

​@MeaganEdwards,

The solution from ​@Mike_AutomaticN is a great approach that will work well as you add more team members to your table. There is just one small addition I would do if you want the assignments to be done based the order that they were assigned a task. In your filtered view, in addition to sorting by count, also sort by last update time. You will want to create a last updated field that points at the linked record for tasks. Then make your second sort to be from oldest to latest for the last update time field. That way if multiple people have the same count number (not sure if this would happen in your scenario, but as you scale, you never know), the automation will choose the one who was assigned their last task the longest from today. Hope that helps!