As of right now the inventory department at my company relies on paper forms and it was recently requested that we digitize the form. I don’t need the form to actually place the order, I just need filled out forms to be sent to the inventory manager. However, as I dove into the process, I hit a wall. Is there a good way to convert the attached form into an airtable form?
Purchase order form
+10
+31Hey Dustin, in short, nah not really I’m afraid.
You’ll probably want to look into other form software that lets you add tables into the forms like Jotform. Here’s a link to their documentation for the form table: Input Table's Multi Type Columns
In my experience, moving old workflows (or forms in this case) into Airtable rarely works well honestly, and if we could revamp how we’re working as well that would probably be super helpful
For example, if this purchase order form is filled up by people who have access to Airtable, what if they did the following instead?
- In a table called “Items”, they key in the
Vendor,Item #,Description,Quantity,Date Needed,Date Received - In a table called “Purchase Orders”, they create a single new record and key in the
Date,Name,Department,Reference # - They link the records created in step 1 to the “Purchase Order” record in step 2
- Once this is done, they mark a checkbox and we have an automation that will send your Inventory Manager an email with a table that includes all the data from step 1 and step 2
This is just an example, of course, and will be highly dependent on what your company’s workflows are like
Happy to brainstorm further!
+35There are 2 parts to your question:
- How to create a form like that.
- How to created a printed (or PDF) document of the form that looks like that.
The answer to both questions is that you will need to use 3rd-party apps.
- To create a form like that, I would highly recommend using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.
Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to create an unlimited number of line items (i.e. linked records) on a form, update Airtable records using a form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, control access to a form via SSO or email domains, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on 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 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.
- To create a printed (or PDF) document that allows for unlimited line items, here are 3 popular solutions:
- DocuMint — the original document creation app for Airtable. Creates PDF files
- DocsAutomator — creates Google Docs documents or PDF files.
- Make’s integrations — which can be integrated with any document-creation app of your choosing, even something as simple as custom Microsoft Word documents.
If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one way that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.
p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld
+10Hey Dustin, in short, nah not really I’m afraid.
You’ll probably want to look into other form software that lets you add tables into the forms like Jotform. Here’s a link to their documentation for the form table: Input Table's Multi Type Columns
In my experience, moving old workflows (or forms in this case) into Airtable rarely works well honestly, and if we could revamp how we’re working as well that would probably be super helpful
For example, if this purchase order form is filled up by people who have access to Airtable, what if they did the following instead?
- In a table called “Items”, they key in the
Vendor,Item #,Description,Quantity,Date Needed,Date Received - In a table called “Purchase Orders”, they create a single new record and key in the
Date,Name,Department,Reference # - They link the records created in step 1 to the “Purchase Order” record in step 2
- Once this is done, they mark a checkbox and we have an automation that will send your Inventory Manager an email with a table that includes all the data from step 1 and step 2
This is just an example, of course, and will be highly dependent on what your company’s workflows are like
Happy to brainstorm further!
Hey @Adam_TheTimeSavingCo, recreating the form isn’t exactly necessary, from what I gathered yesterday from meeting with inventory department, they just need a way to send a digital document to their various departments so they can list what they need. The form doesn’t need to actually place the order, but it does need to communicate to the inventory manager what is needed.
+31Hey @Adam_TheTimeSavingCo, recreating the form isn’t exactly necessary, from what I gathered yesterday from meeting with inventory department, they just need a way to send a digital document to their various departments so they can list what they need. The form doesn’t need to actually place the order, but it does need to communicate to the inventory manager what is needed.
Hm, okay. And I take it the departments that need to list what they need do not have access to Airtable?
+10Hm, okay. And I take it the departments that need to list what they need do not have access to Airtable?
Correct. Some departments don’t even have computers so ideal they want a paper and digital version.
+31Correct. Some departments don’t even have computers so ideal they want a paper and digital version.
Roger that. Hmm, if they don’t have access to Airtable, then that Jotform input table thing is probably going to be the easiest way to deal with this.
So you’d just recreate the paper form in Jotform and then follow this guide to get Jotform to dump that data back into Airtable
+13You can reproduce essentially this exact layout in a way that is friendly even for non-tech-savvy people using our miniExtensions form. Users could fill out the basic data and then add line items in a linked record field for the table below. We support a grid view for the linked record field so you could essentially replicate the table you had been using before. You could then run a miniExtensions automation to generate a PDF from the form submission that you can then print for anybody in the company that doesn't have access to a computer.
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