Fully automating the creation of bases

​@YoungWill 

To integrate PandaDoc with Airtable, you’ll want to combine Make’s PandaDoc integrations along with Make’s Airtable integrations.

You can go from PandaDoc to Airtable (like you mentioned), but it would be much better to go from Airtable to PandaDoc. That would give you the most powerful Airtable system long-term, because you will be able to depend on Airtable as your “single source of truth”.

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 can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

However, you definitely don’t want to keep creating new bases or new tables in Airtable. The proper database structure would have a very limited number of tables to which you continually add new records. You can link records between tables by using a linked record field.

And you will typically want to use interfaces instead of views to see all of your data in the most user-friendly format.

You might gain some insights by taking my free Airtable training course, which you can take for free by signing up for a free 30-day trial with LinkedIn Learning.

Note that my course is extremely outdated because it was created way back in 2020 using one of the very earliest versions of Airtable. It was created before automations even existed, and it was created years before interfaces existed!

However, the core concepts of building a base remain the same to this day — such as working with linked record fields, working with lookup fields, how to work with views, and how to properly structure your base.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and 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

Hm, any chance you could provide some example data?  Think of a Base as a Workbook, and a Table as a Sheet.  And you know how we can add filters, sorts, etc to columns in a Sheet?  That’s basically a view, a way for you to save all the filters and sorts that you’ve made and come back to them.  A nice side effect of that is that different people can be in the same Sheet at the same time and using different filters

I think if I were you I’d structure it as one base only with the following tables:

1. Proposals
2. Proposal Line Items

And then I’d use a third party automation tool like Make or Zapier to trigger when the document is completed and it would create a new record in the Proposals table and attach the document there

That would then trigger an Airtable automation that would use AI to look through the document and grab the pricing table information, and for each row of the pricing table create a new record in the Proposal Line Items table, linked to the original Proposals record.  (Someone would have to review the AI created data against the document of course)

Should be fairly straightforward to set up and if you’d like we could work on building it together in a half hour free call, and here's a link to schedule one!

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Might also be worth thinking about changing the direction of data, really.  Specifically, we could create the Proposal Line Items within Airtable, and then when those were finalized it would trigger a PandaDoc doc to be sent out instead, you know what I mean?

The reverse flow Adam mentioned is worth paying attention to. We’ve found that direction tends to be much easier to manage in practice.

If you start in PandaDoc and try to pull pricing tables back into Airtable, it usually gets brittle pretty quickly (especially with variable line items or changes late in the process).

Building the line items in Airtable first and then generating the PandaDoc from there means you’re working with structured data from the start. That makes it much easier to:

• Track what’s been signed vs still in draft
• Adjust pricing without breaking anything
• Use the data later (reporting, margins, etc.)

Also worth reinforcing Scott’s point - you probably don’t want to be creating new bases each time. One base with proposals + line items will scale much better.

-Holly @Simple Stack