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Field Organization - Showing where used in external automations

  • Nov 12, 2026 11:51 AM UTC
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omf
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  • omf
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Hi all!

This might be a better post for Zapier or Make discussion boards, but thought I’d ask here in case anyone has a solution!

We use Zapier and Make for automations as well as Airtable. We’d like to have a master table / log of our fields and their dependencies - including in Zapier and Make. The reasoning is that when trying to do a field cleanup, it’s incredibly difficult to know if the fields are being used elsewhere & therefore if they can be deleted / name changed / type changed and so on.

I know that within Airtable we can use Manage Fields, which is great. And moving forward, we are trying to put into place adding to the field description if it’s used in external automations. However, there are many that don’t have this description, and the automations the fields are used in may change. No one is updating the field descriptions and it’s quite manual.

 

So is there any way to periodically scan within Zapier and Make and compare against Airtable fields and then write into a Fields table which platforms are using the fields and which automations they are used in?

1 reply

WorkflowEngineer
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  • Nov 12, 2026 12:01 PM UTC

I’d track confirmed field usage separately from inspection coverage. A reference tells you a field is used, but finding no references doesn’t tell you it’s safe to delete.

For each dependency, record the field, platform, automation/step, evidence of the reference and last successful scan. Keep a separate record of automations you couldn’t inspect, so an inaccessible workflow doesn’t end up looking like it has no dependencies.

Before building a scanner, I’d check what each platform’s supported configuration access actually exposes, especially field mappings. That determines whether periodic reconciliation is practical or whether part of the register still needs manual review. Code or raw API requests that build field names dynamically would need special treatment.

Do your Zaps and Make scenarios mostly use standard Airtable steps, or do they also contain code/raw API requests?

-Roe

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