Users management

Hey ​@mmahatsa,

That will depend on what you mean by “approvers”. But assuming that they need to make actual edits to fields (either through the data layer or interfaces) they will need editor access for sure.

You could houwever build a workaround where they get a read only access to the base (assuming there is no sensitive data), or to a specific page, and build Fillout update record forms (free plan should be enough, and it includes a direct integration with airtable) which they can use to make the actual edits. That means that you should create a dynamic formula to construct such record’s update record form url. Please let me know if this is not clear enough and I’ll provide some more details.

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join our Airtable Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel 

​@mmahatsa 

There are 4 ways to allow external collaborators to edit records in your Airtable base. Two of these ways cost money, and two of these ways are free:

1. (PAID) Use Airtable’s portals, which lets you add editors at a reduced cost. However, this reduced cost is still very expensive, and there is a minimum of 15 users. So you might want to turn to a 3rd-party portal.
    
2. (PAID)  Use a 3rd-party portal, which are less expensive than Airtable’s portals.
   
   The most popular 3rd-party portals that are currently available for Airtable are:
   Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, Glide, and MiniExtensions.
   
   I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.
    
3. (FREE) External read-only users can edit your Airtable records for free by 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 update Airtable records using a form.
   
   Fillout gives you a formula that you add to your Airtable base, which automatically creates a special URL for each record.
   
   Read-only users in Airtable are free, and they are allowed to click on URLs. (They are also allowed to click on buttons that take them to external URLs).
   
   So they would click on the the URL (or button) while looking at the record, which would take them to that record in Fillout.
   
   I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:
   - Using Fillout to update an existing Airtable record & create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
   - Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.
    
4. (FREE) External read-only users can edit your Airtable records for free by triggering a custom webhook in Make, which would then automatically run an automation that marks that task as complete.
   
   Same setup as #3 above. You would create a formula in your Airtable base, which would automatically create a unique webhook URL for each record.
   
   Then, your read-only user would click on the URL (or button) while looking at the record in Airtable, which would then trigger the automation.
   
   I demonstrate how to do setup these custom webhooks in this Airtable podcast episode.
   
   Note that my podcast episode demonstrate this in the context of putting the custom webhook URL inside of an email, but you can skip that step.
   
   If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.

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