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Hi,

 

I’m building a page to track hours — comparing what we’ve budgeted versus the actual hours spent. We’re tracking time in Harvest, and at the moment I’m manually entering that data to match it up, which means there’s no direct link between the two systems.

 

We use the same standard phases for every project (example: B01-B09). Each time a client signs a fee proposal, I want to add these same phases to the new project and allocate the initial budgeted hours. In Excel, I’d simply copy and paste multiple rows, but in this system I can’t duplicate more than one row at a time, which is slowing things down.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to duplicate all phases (B01-B09) and assign them to a new project in one go, then input the hours. I also update the actual hours weekly, so it needs to be easy to maintain.

 

I’ve been exploring whether an interface with a button (plus an automation) could do this — so that with one click it would add all the phases for me — but I’m a bit stuck on how to set that up.

 

Questions:

 

  • Is there a simpler way to set this up so I can quickly duplicate phases across projects and track hours?

  • Or is there a completely different way I should be approaching this?

 

Thanks so much for any advice. Please feel free to talk to me like an idiot — I’m still learning and want to get my head around this properly!

 

 

Hey ​@Lauren_Marshall_CTRL 

The automations approach is great and I would definitely recommend playing with automations as much as you can as it is super powerful.

For this problem, I’ll show you how to do it with record templates. This will allow you to add those 9 phases to a project with three clicks.

First, it looks like your structure is something like this:


Where your project is linked to 9 budgets.

To set it up the record template:
Step 1) Create a new record template. Go to the tools section and click record template. You want to create it for your Project table.

Step 2) You want to create and name all 9 of your budget phases

Click “Link a new budget”
Then, just put in the name. To add your second budget click the “+” on the left.

 

Once you’ve done that for all 9 phases, you’re ready to apply the template.
 

To use the record template, you just left click on your new project, click “Apply template”, then select the template that you just created.



Please ask any questions if you get stuck.
If you’re interested in the automation approach, let me know!
 

Hi ​@Lauren_Marshall_CTRL,

  1. This wasn’t your main question, but you were talking about how you have to manually match up the data between Harvest and Airtable.

    I would highly recommend that you use Make’s Harvest integrations along with Make’s Airtable integrations to automate this entire process for you.

    One of my clients has all of their Harvest data automatically syncing to Airtable using Make, and it saves them tons of time on a daily basis.

    If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

    I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.
     
  2. To get back to your main question, one way you could do this would be to use Airtable’s automations.

    With Airtable’s automations, it would be very easy to duplicate one record at a time with a checkbox field that appears next to each record.

    And you could even duplicate multiple records at a time by switching to the grid visualization instead of the list visualization. (Airtable lets you have multiple visualizations on the same interface page, and you can toggle between them.)

    On a grid visualization, you can drag a checkbox cell upwards or downwards into other records to check or uncheck multiple rows at once.

    So, to setup your automation, what you’d want to do is:

    a) Add a checkbox field to your table.

    b) Create an automation that is triggered by “When A Record Matches Conditions”.

    c) Your “condition” would be the checkbox field being checked.

    d) Then, for your action step, you would choose “create record” and you would set all the fields that you want to set for your brand new record.

    e) If you need to pull in data from the record that you checked, you would click on the blue plus sign to bring in any field values from the triggering record.

Hope this helps!

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

Thanks for your responses!

BuildForAT, i ended up using your method as a first try as it seemed th most simple! Thanks for the step by step. I can see when i have applied that template is carries over to my budget table whihc is great - but it doesnt link to the project so it pulls through empty. I thought it would automatically assign the linked project as it’s in that line but it hasn’t. Is there a way to do that?

ScottWorld, I actually considered Zapier which appears to do the same thing but its on a subscription too. I know there is a way that we can record time directly on Airtable using a timer but I am not sure how to integrate that with adding time manually. Each team member likse to track their time differently so I think I will try and tackle building that in next!

​@Lauren_Marshall_CTRL 

You mentioned Zapier in your message above, but I would STRONGLY recommend against using Zapier.

Make is INFINITELY more powerful & customizable than Zapier, yet it is SIGNIFICANTLY CHEAPER than Zapier.

I wrote an entire post here comparing Make vs. Zapier.

Hope this helps!

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Thanks for your responses!

BuildForAT, i ended up using your method as a first try as it seemed th most simple! Thanks for the step by step. I can see when i have applied that template is carries over to my budget table whihc is great - but it doesnt link to the project so it pulls through empty. I thought it would automatically assign the linked project as it’s in that line but it hasn’t. Is there a way to do that?

Hey ​@Lauren_Marshall_CTRL,

Glad you were able to follow!

Hmm the new budgets you created should automatically be linked back to the new project. Would you mind sharing pictures of
1) The new project record you created and what’s in the linked Budgets field
2) The new Budgets created and what’s in their linked project field
3) The record template you created

That should help me figure out what’s going on. Thank you!

 

Hi BuildForAT,

 

Thanks so much in advance for your help. Hopefully this is what you mean?

 

 

 

Ah, It’s come in under a hidden field in my hours table. Should I relink the projects all under the ‘Project overview’ column to keep things clean, or can i get the project to link to ‘linked project’?

 

​@Lauren_Marshall_CTRL Yes, you can do either. 👍

The first option would be much easier to do as you can just copy and paste those linked values over. If you want to do the second option, let me know!

Hi ​@BuildForAT ,

Thanks heaps for your help. 

I have a similar requirement for the programs component of our work flow. I have built this in based on a live project but would be great to have a template ready. 


I have a bunch of dependencies all set up. Can I apply a template with so much detail?

Please see example below

 

​@Lauren_Marshall_CTRL it’s my pleasure to help!

I always encourage exploration. So I would say: Give it a try to see if you can create a record template with all that detail! Because either way you learn something. If you can, then you can. If you can’t, then you’ve discovered a limitation in Airtable.

(Hint: the answer is you can. You likely will be able to set the name, phase, duration, and dependencies. The start date might be tricky)

 

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