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Hi,

My daughter started her own home business to sell things that she makes. I’m looking for a free and simple system that I can use to track her sales and expenses. All I’m envisioning are ‘tables’ for Customers and Products and then a way to input orders (who ordered what) and do simple reports to pull a list of all the orders within a timeframe or something like that. And also a place to record purchase for supplies to eventually do a cash flow type report to show profits.

Since Airtable is designed to be used in lots of different ways, I’m completely lost as to the best way to use it in this way or if maybe there’s a better solution out there to fit my needs. I’m open to all advice.

Thanks.

Yes, you can setup all of that within Airtable to manage all of your daughter’s orders. Airtable would be a fantastic tool for your “internal team members” (i.e.  your family) to manage all the operations of the business 

If you need help building and customizing Airtable for your specific needs, please feel free to reach out to me: ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

However, if you need your external customers to login & create/manage their own orders, then you would need to create a customer portal, where customers can login to create orders & view existing orders. There are a few ways to get this functionality:

  1. Use Airtable’s portals, which costs $120 per month for 15 users, and $8 per month for each additional customer after that.
     
  2. Use a 3rd-party portal, which are much less expensive and much more powerful than Airtable’s portals.

    The most popular portals that are currently available for Airtable are:
    Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, and Glide.

    I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.
     
  3. “Light” portal system: External users can create & edit Airtable records by using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

    I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:
    - Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
    - Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.
     
  4. Alternatively, instead of building your own customer portal, you could just use an app like Square or Shopify or Stripe to take the orders, and then use Make’s automations and integrations to send that data to Airtable.

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

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