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Building an ERP-style Purchase Order system in Airtable connected to Google Sheets budgets

  • May 7, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 29 views
Nico Larreta
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Hi everyone,

We’re a creative/production agency and over the last few years we’ve progressively evolved from using Airtable as a simple operational tool into building a much deeper internal management system.

Today we have an ERP-style workflow in Airtable for Purchase Orders:

  • Purchase Orders (POs)

  • Invoice receptions

  • Payment tracking

  • Approval/payment status flows

  • Linked operational and financial information

The system is working well operationally, but now we’re trying to solve the next layer:
connecting our Airtable PO system with the Google Sheets budget file of each project.

Each project has its own Google Sheets budget where production teams manage budget allocations and spending. What we want is to create a bridge between:

  • structured financial/operational data in Airtable

  • and the budgeting workflow inside Google Sheets

Our goal is:
when someone imputes/allocates an expense in the budget sheet, that expense should always be linked to an existing PO from Airtable.

We’re currently exploring architectures like:

  • Airtable + Make + Google Sheets

  • syncing PO allocations into project budget sheets

  • using Airtable as the operational source of truth while Sheets remains the budgeting environment

The main challenges we’re thinking about are:

  • syncing PO allocations into the correct project sheet

  • handling updates/cancellations

  • keeping the workflow flexible for production teams

  • deciding how much financial structure should live in Airtable vs Sheets

I’d love to hear if anyone has built something similar, especially:

  • ERP-style financial workflows in Airtable

  • Airtable ↔ Google Sheets budget integrations

  • operational + accounting hybrid systems

  • PO/imputation workflows

And if anyone here works as an Airtable consultant or advisor and has experience with these kinds of systems, I’d also be very interested in connecting.

Thanks a lot!

1 reply

TheTimeSavingCo
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Hm, and there’ll consistently be new projects and thus new Google Sheets budget files, is that right?  Are you planning on handling the linking of the expense to the PO on Sheets or in Airtable?

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If we’re planning on doing it in Sheets, I’m imagining in the budget file there’s a sheet for Expenses and a sheet for POs or something?  This seems kind of messy though.  The PO numbers would need to be manually typed into the Expenses sheet and we’d need a vlookup or something to display the POs status

I’m thinking we could create a ‘Sheet ID’ field in the Projects table where we add the ID of that project’s Google Sheet budget file.  We’d then have an automation that would trigger whenever an update needs to be sent to the budget file and it would use that Sheet ID and search for the row to update etc.  Make would work fine for this I think


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If we’re planning on doing it via Airtable, then I’m imagining we’d have a table of ‘Expenses’, where any updates to any of the budget files get synced into that table.  This would be linked to the ‘Purchase Orders’ table and we’d make sure each Expense record is linked accordingly

To make this work I think we’re going to need to have one automation per budget file, and we could handle this via Make as well.  I’ve managed to get this working with Google Apps Script to keep costs low, and so you could potentially explore that avenue too!

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It does seem like this is a fairly high amount of overhead though.  You’ve probably already considered this and can’t do it for business reasons, but if you could move this into Airtable entirely it’d be much cleaner: 

  1. Create an ‘Expenses’ table
  2. Give everyone a form to add Expenses records to this table
    1. Users are required to select which Project and which PO their expense is tied to on submission

And if they need to edit stuff and you don’t want to pay for additional seats, you could use Fillout (https://www.fillout.com/) which is free for up to 1000 edits per month, or keep it native with Airtable’s guide on how to update records with forms

Adam, Airtable Consultant - thetimesaving.company
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