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Sum of Records in one table to another

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Dev
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

I use my airtable to book bands and organize their data. The band makes a profile using the AT form and it populates one of our tables and creates a record. I know at the bottom of the column it displays the SUM of records but is there a way of taking that number and putting it into a new table’s record. Basically I want to take the SUM of all the bands that sign up (in table 1) and in Table 2 have a record that says “Total Bands” “300” that way each time a new person signs up that number will increase.

I want to eventually integrate it with zappier so I can have a counter on my website for how many bands we have and all the amount of gigs we book them.

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1 Reply 1

There are a few different ways of getting the number of bands, each with their own tradeoffs.

  • Usually the way to get Airtable to put the total number of records in a table cell is to have all the records linked to a record in the second table. Then Airtable can use a count field or a rollup field to sum the number of linked records. However, if you do not already have all the records linked to a single record in another table, it might require some base redesign. You would need an onging method of making sure that all new records are linked correctly, which can be automated with with Zapier.

  • If you are using the Standard REST API to put information on your website, you can have the code that uses the API calculate the number of bands for you. Although there Standard REST API cannot directly tell you the number of records, you can do successive reads of records (returning zero fields to reduce the network traffic) and see how many records are returned. This would require significant coding and might be difficult to maintain.

  • If you do not need the number to update in real-time, and can have a human push a “run” button whenever you want to update the totals (e.g. every morning), you can have a script in Scripting block calculate the number of records and put that information in a table. This method has a lot of flexibility, and is easier to implement than going through the Standard REST API. Unfortunately, you have to remember to press the “run” button.


If this answers your question, please mark this post as the solution. Otherwise, could you please give a bit more details and a screen capture?