Help with automations : how to create records in two different tables at the same time

Yes, this is possible with either Fillout’s advanced forms or Airtable’s native forms.

In either case, you can just create an Airtable automation that does this for you.

You would use the “Find Records” action to search for the user’s email address in your Clients table.

Then, you would add a conditional action after that.

If the length of your Find Records action = 0, then the Client doesn’t exist, so you can create a new client.

If the length of your Find Records action > 0, then the client does exist so you can link the form to their existing record.

Note that this will fail if the Find Records action finds more than one client with the same email address. In that case, you would want to turn to more advanced automation tools like Make’s advanced automations for Airtable.

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

Yeap you can do this with Airtable and I’ve set up an example base here for you to check out!

Here’s how the automation would look:

You can duplicate the base and check out the set up, and if you get confused you can refer to Airtable’s guide on how to link existing records here:

https://support.airtable.com/docs/linking-existing-records-using-automations

Hey thanks to both of you I think i managed to get it to work with Airtable native forms. I have a follow up question : I see that Fillout seems to be a very powerful tool overall. Would it be posible to achieve my goal entirely within fillout? Or would I still need to use airtable’s automations at some point to detect wether a client is in my “client” table or not? If you know of any fillout ressource or tutorial that could help me I would love to know about it.

Thanks again!

Yes, as far as I’m concerned, Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable is one of the greatest apps on the planet to use with Airtable.

As you’ve already figured out, Fillout is 100% free and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, pre-fetch dynamic data from an Airtable record, customize the style and branding of your form, customize a theme for your form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, add a login page to your form, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.

Fillout doesn’t have the same types of automations as Airtable does, but you could still setup your form in Fillout, and then as soon as the form is submitted into Airtable, you could run that very same automation in Airtable that we guided you through above.

Even better, you could setup your automation in Make.com using Make’s Fillout integrations. Make would monitor for when your Fillout form is submitted, and then it would use Make’s Airtable integrations to do what you want to do in Airtable. If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.

However, if you wanted this to be done ENTIRELY in Fillout — without triggering any automations at all — then you would need to do a slightly different setup in Fillout.

You would need to have your clients login to their own “client profile page” on Fillout by giving them a unique URL that is assigned to their client record in Airtable. (If they’re not already a client, you would give them a “new client” form in Fillout to fill out first, and then you would automatically email them their unique URL after that.)

For extra security, you can even add a login page to your Fillout form.

Once the users are looking at their “client profile page” in Fillout, you would then give the users a linked record field that would show them all of their previous registrations (if any), and would allow them to create a new registration from that linked record field.

Then, when the form is submitted, all your data will already be in the right place in Airtable. No automations necessary!

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

• Using Fillout to update an existing Airtable record & create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
• Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

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

Would it be posible to achieve my goal entirely within fillout? Or would I still need to use airtable’s automations at some point to detect wether a client is in my “client” table or not?

Hmm, you’d have to expose the entire customer list to whoever’s filling out the form if you wanted to do it within Fillout I think.  The idea would be to add the linked field to the Customers field to the form, so users would be able to select the Customer record themselves, and if they can’t find the Customer record they want they’d create it immediately

Seems unlikely this is a workflow you’re comfortable with though!

No, the entire customer list wouldn’t need to be exposed. I already explained in my post above the multiple different ways this could be setup in Fillout.

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

Ok, thank you again for all the info. I will push my newbie luck once more with one more question, I appreciate the help.

So right now, with automations, when a registration form is filled I managed to achieve the following :

-If the client’s email is not in the “Clients” table, a new record is created for that client that include a link to the registration form.

-If the client’s email is already in the “Clients” table, it’s record is updated to include a link to the registration form.

A problem arises when a client fills two registration forms. Then, in the client’s record, the link to the second registration form overwrite the link to the first form that is already there. I found a couple discussions that points to potential solutions using commas but I couldn’t make it work.

How would you adresse this? Thank you so much!

There are 2 different ways to do that, but this is the easier of the 2 ways:

Instead of updating your client record in the client table, simply update the registration record in the registration table to link to the Client ID that you just found in the “Find Records” step. 

There is ALREADY a linked record field in your registration table that “back links” to the clients table. Airtable automatically created that linked record field for you in your registration table. If you don’t see it, check the “hidden fields” button in your toolbar.

So all you need to do is update that linked record field in the Registration Table with the Client ID.

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

That works, thanks!!

You’re welcome! Glad I could help! :)

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant