I’m new to Airtable and could use some advice on setting up my workspace. I’m trying to use Airtable for project management on our self GC custom home build. Right now, I’ve set up:
A Budget table (very detailed with financial info)
A Schedule/Stages table (broad view of schedule, start & end date, duration, contractor)
A Sub-Stages table (all of the “tasks” under each stage, status, priority, responsible party, notes, etc.)
The problem I’m running into is that the line items in my Budget table are identical to the line items in my Sub-Stages table. I’d like to avoid duplicating them, but I’m stuck because Airtable doesn’t allow lookups directly from the primary field in another table and I feel like I am missing a better way to do this.
What’s the best way to structure this so that my budget line items can also feed into my sub stages, while still keeping financial data separate I fear combining them into one table will be wayy too much information into one table.
Thanks in advance for any guidance!
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Hey @sarah.ballard,
Would you mind sharing an actual/dummy example? I believe you’ll want to look into rollup fields, but I might be missing smth. If you could share some further context (and maybe screenshots) that could help.
Hm, if the records in the Budget table are exactly the same as the Sub-Stages table, my advice would be to just have one table with all the finance + task info in it, and use views to create a ‘Finance’ type view and one for a ‘Task’ type view for hiding the fields
If there’s a possibility that multiple Budget records can be linked to a single Sub-Stages record, then keeping them separate as it is makes sense
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If they’re the same but you’d still like to keep them separate, and there’s always going to be one Budget record to one Sub-Stages record, then I’d suggest:
Create a linked field between the two tables
Create an automation that’ll trigger when a record gets created in the Sub-Stages table
Trigger here is arbitrary, really
The automation will create a Budget record and link it to the Sub-Stages record
Create lookup fields in both tables as needed
This way you only key in the data once into Sub-Stages, the link to Budget is automatically created, and any changes you make in either table will reflect in the other as they’re lookups
Would you mind sharing an actual/dummy example? I believe you’ll want to look into rollup fields, but I might be missing smth. If you could share some further context (and maybe screenshots) that could help.
Hi Mike please see the below screenshots hopefully this helps explain my situation better
Screenshot of my Budget table:
Screenshot of my Substages table:
Screenshot of my Schedule/Stages table:
It looks like they’re one to one, and so I’d really suggest combining the two tables and using views to handle the information overload worry you have
If you’d still like to split it out amongst two tables, if you could let me know what issues you faced trying to use the automated budget record creation solution I mentioned I’d be happy to try to find a workaround for you!
