Inspection workflow for construction sites – Airtable integration

Hmm, the biggest problem you’re going to face is the bit about updating all the inventory items linked to the site

Airtable forms don’t support this functionality and so you’d have to use something like Fillout.com to handle this.  This works, but would be really clunky.  For example, the technician wouldn’t see all the items linked to the site they were inspecting, instead they’d have a linked field where the available options would be the items linked to the site they’ve selected.  The record creation here would be very clunky and tedious as well with a lot of wait time in between

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I’d suggest you look into using an Interface for this instead, really.  Would need to play around with the Record Review layout I reckon, but the nice bit about this is that we’d be able to set an automation to automatically create one record per Item for that Site and automatically link it to the new Inspection record your tech created, so they wouldn’t have to do all that manually

Because it’s in the Interface keying in data will be really smooth too

For the automated PDF generation, you’ve got a bunch of options, check out DocsAutomator for that, their free plan has access to automated PDF generation so you can try it out

Another popular one is DocuMint, but the automating bit requires a paid plan unfortunately

​@k88k 

1. As mentioned above, your best bet for doing all of this with a form is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable because it lets you update existing Airtable records with a form, it lets you create & edit linked records with a form, and it lets you create custom PDF files from a form submission.
   
   Fillout is 100% free, and it also offers hundreds of other features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to display Airtable lookup fields on forms, add a login page to your form, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, 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 update Airtable records and create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
• Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

2. Alternatively, you can also do all of this by paying for your users to become editors of your Airtable interfaces, and giving them access to your Airtable interfaces.
   
   Then, if you need to generate PDF files from your Airtable interfaces, here are a few popular solutions for generating documents from Airtable:

• 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.)

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld