How to create a running total or balance

[Tina_White]

I’m not able to find an Airtable example of a simple checkbook register. Balance = Previous Balance - Debit + Credit. How would you do that in Airtable?

[Elias_Gomez_Sai]

Can you describe your base’s Tables and Fields?

[Tina_White]

Like a simple checkbook register where the balance for each record is calculated automatically.

Date | Payee | Debit | Credit | Balance
2/13/18 | Deposit | 0.00 | $60 | $60
02/14/18 | Gas Station | $40 | 0.00 | $20

[Elias_Gomez_Sai]

I don’t know if I’m understanding, but you can make Balance to be a Formula field, and do a simple subtraction.

[Julian_Kirkness]

The issue here is that you can’t refer simply to the previous row in Airtable - in fact it’s really a meaningless notion in a database because it would depend on sorting, filtering etc. However, if you have the Blocks beta then you could find that the Pivot Table option could get you somewhere. Here’s an example:

In this example, I’m showing the dates grouped by the actual date - but there’s no reason not to group by week, month, quarter, year etc.

Not a running total but you get a current balance and it’s very simple.

[Frank_Arnold]

This doesn’t work.
There is no way to say "let this cell have the value of the previous cell value + X.
Remember that Airtable is not a spreadsheet app, It misses all the calculating features for such needs. Better use Libreoffice Calc or Excel for this things.

[Xemo]

i am looking to do something similar - ran out of ideas but will keep trying

[Ricardo_Alamino]

I tested and did that with Blocks. But they won´t be available in the long term in free version, so…

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

If a simple display of the “Current Balance” (active, right now) would be sufficient, I can definitely help anyone do that simply and in an automated fashion.

However, if you really need to see the “Historical Balance” (the balance after each change, in a chronological record) this is a way to do it, but it’s not simple, and requires a little upkeep. We have a resident :mage: who figured this out and posted about how to do it in the #show-and-tell section:

Multi-record calculations (c.f. 'running balance,' 'row number,' and the like) Show and tell

tl;dr version: A frequent query and/or complaint concerns users who wish to access data from a record for use in a calculation performed in a different record from the same table. Often this takes the form of a user asking ‘how to retrieve a value based on row number’; other times the user wishes to perform a calculation that assumes knowledge of the previous record — for instance, maintaining a running balance. A recently published base contains four approaches to this problem, three involving …

But respond back if you’d be satisfied to just be able to see the Current Balance (always and only the Current Balance), and I can definitely help you with that.

[The_Trove]

I’d like to be able to see the current balance. I’ve been running a spreadsheet on Google for my new business, tracking expenses for each individual item and then giving me a profit margin in both dollar and % amounts. I’m having a whopper of a time trying to get Airtable to do the same thing. I feel like Airtable will be great in the long run, that it can display my data and integrate with more solutions eventually than a simple Google spreadsheet can… and visually I like it better. But having a difficult time getting going.