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’ve created four tables. Clients is the master table. New submissions from my intake form go straight into Clients.

The other three tables are Service_1, Service_2, and Service_3. When I deliver, say, Service 1 to someone who already exists in Clients, I want to link that service record to the existing client—not just type their name again.

Concretely: if I start a new record in Service_1 and type “John Doe,” I want that entry to reference the same John Doe in the Clients table, so I can pull his saved info (email, phone, notes) via lookups—rather than duplicating data.

What’s the best way to do this?

Hey ​@garbed,

This will depend on whether you are concerned about the end user filling out the form selecting their name from a dropdown of existing clients (they would see other clients name), or not.
If this is not an issue: You can have a filed on your form, which will show the Client’s linked record as a dropdown.
If this is an issue, you could pre-fill client record id for such field. To this effect you would generate a dynamic url for the form, personalized for each Client (using a formula).

I’d highly suggest you use Fillout forms for all of the above. Super powerful forms, really generous free plan.

For last, as a side comment: I think you might want to revise your data base architecture. I really believe you’ll be better off just having one table for clients and one table for services, you can then filter services by service Type for example if needed.

If you share some more details and context I’d be happy to guide you through. Also, feel free to grab a slot on my calendar if needed.

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join our Airtable Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel 

I agree with everything ​@Mike_AutomaticN said (and checkout Fillout, it’s great).

Just in case it’s necessary, I do like to explicitly address potentially questions of basic functions, as I see people coming at Airtable from other systems like Access and such… At the basic level to answer your question, create Linked Record fields from Clients to your other tables (it’ll be 3 fields since you have 3 other tables). Then when you type John Doe in the associated field in Service_2, it’ll associate the record from the Client table and you can add additional lookup fields to display email address, phone number, whatever.

As Mike mentioned though, the architecture here seems redundant and could use a bit more of a think. Another potential problem he didn’t point out is duplicate clients. If you have any potential of someone submitting the form again, it’ll create another record in your Client table. In this setup I’d probably default to a base consisting of 3 tables: “Requests”, “Clients”, “Services”. The form feeds into “Requests” (or maybe inquiries?) then an automation can be setup to copy the client data into “Client”, and you link Client<-->Services. 

 

Oh yes, nice one ​@DisraeliGears01!! Requests table would be great.
We might need to understand how are client records being created on the table though.

Under a paid Fillout plan you could avoid creating duplicates though. But that is a different discussion altogether. 

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join our Airtable Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

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