One-on-one Meeting Relationships

[Kite_Electric]

Am I able to link two records in the same table together?

I have two tables called “Contacts” and “Attendance”
Each meeting, I record attendance and which contact meeting with who since the last meeting
Each new meeting is identified by date and the “Attendance” table is grouped by date to identify the meetings
If Ann has a meeting with Greg, I’d like to add Greg to ann’s record in that meeting, but I’d also like Ann’s name to be added to Greg’s record for that meeting. While I could scroll back and forth during the meeting double-entering every entry, I feel that there’s an easier way to do this.

The goal is to track how many “one-on-ones” each person has had since the last meeting. Perhaps I need a new table or a different methods of database design.

Hopefully someone is willing to help me out on this. Thank you in advance.

[Zollie]

Yes, you’ll be using the field type ‘Linked Record.’ ‘Lookup’ fields are available too once the linked record is rigged up. See the docs on advanced linking.

[Kite_Electric]

I’ve tried a lookup field in “Attendance” referencing the Meetings column in “Contacts”. Unfortunately, with the way this base was designed, the result of this is every one-on-one the contact has had ever. I’d want this result to be filtered to only since the last meeting.

[Zollie]

Sorry for the delay. I’ve read through this more carefully now. One area I’m confused about is the difference between a ‘meeting’ and a ‘one-on-one.’ How are each being tracked?

As far as design goes, so far I’m imagining you could have something like what’s below, but it doesn’t yet take into consideration one-on-ones and what you’d like to do with them. If you share additional information can you try to format it like I am so we’re on the same page?

Contacts Table

Name (single line text)
Bob
Greg

Meetings (linked records: attendance table)
11/11/11, 11/20/20

Attendance Table

Date (date field)
11/20/20

Contacts in Attendance (linked records: contact table)
Bob, Greg

[Kite_Electric]

Hey Zollie. No worries! I certainly appreciate whatever help you can offer.

My tables are quite a bit more complex than your example, but you’ve got the basic premise down.

Regarding “Meetings” vs “One-on-ones”, a meeting is held every week where I need to take attendance, track leads, record guests, and so on. A One-on-one is where two attendees meet outside of the weekly meetings. Moderately confusing, I know, but we track these one-on-ones and award points at the end of a quarter based on leads, one-to-ones, guests, business, and so on.

My attendance table is set up as below:

• Attendance ID (Contact & " - " & Meeting)
• Contact (Linked to Contact table)
• Meeting (Linked to Meeting table)
• Contact type (Lookup from Contact table)
• Attendance (Drop down: Present, Late, etc)
• Leads (Numeric input)
• One-on-one Meetings (Count field of “Met With”)
• Met With (This is the field in question)
• Guests (Linked to Contact table, filtered by Type Guest)
• Additional columns not pertinent to this discussion

Contacts Table

• First name
• Last Name
• Contact Type
• Attendance (Linked to Attendance table)
• Additional columns not pertinent to this discussion

Meetings Table

• Meeting Date
• Attendees (Linked to Attendance table)
• Lead Rollup (From Attendance table)
• One-on-one Meetings Rollup (From Attendance table)
• Additional columns not pertinent to this discussion

Regarding the Met With column in the Attendance table, If Jason met with Sally, I’d like to add Sally’s name to Jason’s attendance record, but also somehow show that sally met with Jason during that period. Do I need another table? What would that schema look like?

I hope this clarifies my request a bit. Again, I appreciate any help you can offer.

Thank you.

[Zollie]

Haven’t found a way to count up one-on-ones for each attendee yet using vanilla Airtable tools or formulas. But you can count the total number of one-on-ones since that last meeting pretty easily. The new Scripting Block could definitely do what you’re describing, but you’d probably want to hire a JavaScript developer to help implement that. Integrations or other 3rd party tools could work too, but why bother using an external tool making API requests if it can all be handled within the base.

Quick Fix

With the setup below, you’d be able to group the One-on-Ones by ‘Last Meeting,’ then manually filter by each person’s name. That way each ‘Last Meeting’ group would display a count for how many meetings that person had attended. But you’d of course need to do that for each contact you’re trying to lookup.

Contacts
Name

One-on-Ones
Date
Attendees (linked Contacts)
Last Meeting (linked Meeting)

Meetings
Date

Attendances
Attendee (linked Contact)
Meeting (linked Meeting)

Quick Scripted Solution Pseudocode

If you ended up using the scripting block, one approach would be record a granular contact by contact count to a field in Contacts.

Contacts

Name
Bob

One-on-Ones Since Last Meeting (Integer)
5

Ideal Solution Pseudocode

But this runs the risk of displaying the wrong meeting if you’re putting in future dates. So it’d be better to record a historical account for each meeting. For instance, by instead recording the full count for each meeting in Meetings.

Meetings

Date
1/1/11

One-on-One Totals (Long Text)
John: 3
Bob: 5
…

Hope this helps some.

[Kite_Electric]

Hey Zollie,

That certainly helps. I’ll get the One-on-one table set up and see what I can do with it.

Thank you very much for all the help!