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Hi everyone,

I’m working on a budgeting setup in Airtable and would really appreciate some community insight.

We currently have a well-structured “CostComponents Employees NL” table, where we define specific account-level budgets per employee. These accounts all roll up under OPEX, and more specifically under the top-level group account “610000 – Staff Costs”. Some of these accounts belong to the group accounts:

  • 611000 – Direct Staff Costs
  • 612000 – Other Personnel Costs
  • 613000 – Car Costs

Now here’s the situation:

  • Certain accounts are budgeted at the employee level only and should not be editable elsewhere.
  • Certain staff related accounts are budgeted at high-over level (not on employee level,
  • Other OPEX accounts (not staff-related, Operational Costs) need to be budgeted at account level, under the following group accounts:
    • Housing Costs
    • Office Costs
    • IT Costs
    • Marketing and Travel Costs
    • General Costs

We are looking to build a unified “Chart of Accounts Budgeting Table”, where:

  1.  All relevant accounts are listed (including grouped totals like 610000, 611000, etc.).
  2.  Staff-related accounts pull their values from the “CostComponents Employees NL” table, and are read-only in this table.
  3. Staff-related accounts which are not defined in the “CostComponents Employees NL” tabel, can be entered directly in this table (they are editable).
  4. Operational Cost accounts can be entered directly in this table (they are editable).
  5. Group accounts (like 610000, 620000 etc.) are automatically calculated sums of the underlying accounts.
  6. The columns represent months, and for each row and month, we’d like the ability to control which months are editable (e.g. freeze certain months).

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My key questions:

  • What’s the best Airtable structure to bring this together? Two tables with synced fields? Linked records with rollups? Interfaces?
  • Can we enforce column-level permissions or freezing on specific rows/months? (based on roles perhaps)
  • Are there creative interface-level workarounds for making part of a record read-only?

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Any advice or examples are very welcome!
Thanks so much in advance 🙏

Have a great day,

Youri

Hmm, does this mean you have separate tables for the Staff accounts and OPEX accounts data?

The bit about having each column be a month is slightly worrying; generally the recommendation would be to have each row be a month instead.  Having it as columns makes it pretty difficult to manipulate the data later on, but if you’ve already considered this and need this for your workflow then there isn’t much choice I suppose?

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I’m not too clear on what your base structure or workflow is like, and so below are my best guesses, sorry!


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What’s the best Airtable structure to bring this together? Two tables with synced fields? Linked records with rollups? Interfaces?

Yeap assuming you’ve got multiple tables of data, an Interface is probably your best bet

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Can we enforce column-level permissions or freezing on specific rows/months? (based on roles perhaps)

Freezing on specific rows isn’t possible I’m afraid.  Column level is possible, tied to the user account

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Are there creative interface-level workarounds for making part of a record read-only?

Yeap, with the List Layout you can set which columns are editable:

And you can also control this via the record details

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