What you’re wondering is if a client can update their existing “client record” in Airtable using a form, after their client record has already been created in Airtable.

Yes, this can be done by using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which lets your clients update their own records using a form.

In your case, as soon as they fill out a “new client form” for the first time, their new record will be created in Airtable, and then you will send them an automated email that gives them a special URL. This special URL will enable them to update their record in Airtable by using an “update form”.

You can see how to set this up in my video below, which also shows off many other advanced techniques using Fillout:

• Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.

Fillout is 100% free, and it also offers hundreds of other 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, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, control access to a form via SSO or email domains or a list of email addresses stored in Airtable, 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.

I also show a few more advanced features of Fillout on this Airtable podcast episode:

• 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

​@ScottWorld Wow! 😀 Thank you!

You’re welcome! Glad I could help! :)

Fillout works pretty great, but in case you need to keep it within Airtable they also have a guide on how to do this internally that you can find here: https://support.airtable.com/docs/updating-records-using-a-form-in-airtable

It is not recommended to keep this within Airtable, because Airtable’s methodology comes with some serious problems and major downsides:

1. You will need to create an extremely lengthy & unwieldy formula that acts as your “prefill link”.
2. You will have to continually & constantly send out updated prefilled links to your users that always contain the newest data. If the user accidentally clicks on an outdated link, they will be taken to outdated data in the form. So they would never be able to re-use a link nor bookmark a link as an “Update My Account Profile” link.
3. Airtable’s prefilled links do not work with all field types… particularly attachment fields or lengthy long text fields that exceed URL limits.
4. Airtable’s forms will never update old records… they always create new records, and then you will need to write complex automations to overwrite the old data or merge the old data with the new data. You will also need to figure out what to do with the extra records that are created from the form submission.
5. If you need the data to remain private or secure, Airtable’s prefilled links reveal all the data within the link. With Fillout’s links, you get one simple, non-changing link per user that doesn’t reveal any data, and you can even add multiple different layers of security to the form if necessary using login pages.
6. You will lose all the advanced features of Fillout’s forms.
7. And much more.

The only effective way to accomplish this is to use Fillout’s ability to update Airtable records directly with a form,

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

Scott and Adam are both right, Airtable has a kind of annoying way to implement this which can be handy if your work environment is no new apps ever, whereas Fillout is just a simpler, amazing forms software.

I just want to chime in though that your final question comment about email matching does work if you wanted to go that route rather than Fillout. I have a solution in production where people register for a monthly recurring event, and when the registration form (handled through Airtable for once rather than Fillout) has an email that already exists in the contact table, their contact table entry is updated to show the new registration. A staff member then reviews unmatched entries at the end of the month to either create a new contact record, ignore it, or assign it to an existing contact (someone used an alternate email address or misspelled it).

I find this formulation handy for very light touch engagements, as the update record version requires someone to keep the link (or auto-response email containing the link) to update. It’s more error prone, being reliant on proper email address usage, but for something low stakes that we don’t want end users to have to tinker and has low volume (30-40 submissions/month) it’s a good enough solution. Just another alternate option 🤷‍♂️