How to restrict a new collaborator's access to historical records and sensitive fields?

re: Field-Level Security: I have a "Salary" column in my base that is highly confidential. I want to ensure that certain team members cannot see this specific field.

I’d recommend using Interfaces for this.  You’d make sure that your users do not have Base access and only have Interface access, and then would ensure that the pages that your users have access to don’t have the Salary field available

The downside to this is that your users won’t be able to create their own fields, views or automations etc which is a pretty big limitation.  To solve for this, you could consider having two bases instead:

1. Base A: Everyone has access to this
2. Base B: Only you (and other relevant people) have access to this.  You’ll sync data from Base A over to this base, and the Salary field will be in this base as well

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re: Historical Data Restriction: When a new staff member joins the team, I want them to only be able to view records created from their start date onwards. I need to find a way to hide all "historical" records that were created before they joined the base.

Hm I think this is theoretically possible with Interfaces.  Interfaces let you filter records based on whether the logged in user is linked to that record in some form (documentation here: https://support.airtable.com/v1/docs/interface-designer-permissions?highlight=interface#filtering-data-by-current-user)

And so the idea would be to have automations that would run every time a record gets created in your base that would link the newly created record to all the currently active users, which would then allow you to filter on them.  And so if a new user joined today, they wouldn’t be able to access all the records created before he joined, but anything new would be linked to him and thus accessible, does that make sense?

 I don’t know whether this is actually viable though as it’d eat through your automations pretty quickly if you create lots of records.  There’s also a bit of weirdness to deal with with linked records, e.g. if an Invoice was created yesterday but the line items were created today, the new user would be able to view the line items but not the Invoice it was linked to

Hey ​@kethieumau,

I’d highly suggest following Adam’s advice above. It is spot on. Feel free to grab a slot using this link, I’d be happy to show you around if that helps.
 

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel