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Hi,

I’m relatively new to Airtable and I want to use it to help track inventory. I’m not familiar with coding or complex formulas and I’m thinking those are the exact things I’m going to need to pull this off…

Ideally, I want a base that has a full list of inventory and user capabilities to allow checking in/out different items. I want quantity to auto-update based on in/out. The user facing side needs to be very simple and easy. 

Originally, I was thinking a form where the user will type in the ID and whether they're checking it in or out and it will auto update the quantity but now that I’m trying to work through that- it doesn’t seem very straightforward. A form recording every single response as a new line item is not useful in this case.

Quantity number will be very important because I want a dashboard that displays what items are available and where to find them. 

Any guidance would be incredibly helpful- other posts, help pages, formula suggestions, general layout, literally anything. Thanks so much in advance. 

Hey ​@ktk33!

Welcome! This would probably be a very long answer. Happy to help out with the high-level answer, but would be happy to hop on a brief call to help you out/show you around.

You will want to pay special attention to your database architecture. I would suggest having the following tables and fields:

Contacts (first name, last name, etc)
Products (name, id, inventory, etc)
Orders (type, date, contact)
Order Line Items (product, qty)

Inventory on the Products table would be a Rollup field, showing the resulting qty after all Order Line Items have been taken into consideration. For more on rollup fields, you can take a look at this post.

If you nail the architecture, you would be able to create useful interfaces easily. Otherwise you would probably hit big scalability limitations in the short term. 

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

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