New: Repeating groups of actions in Automations

[Helen_Zeng]

👋 Hi, I’m Helen, a Product Manager here at Airtable, and I'm very excited to announce that you can now repeat groups of actions on multiple records within an Automation!

When working with a list of items, you may want to carry out a set of actions for every item in the list.You can now scale your work by taking a set of actions on multiple records at once. 

Repeating groups help you do just that. For example, sending a personalized email to each customer when you have a list of customer contact records, or sending out a list of assigned tasks to each member of your team every Monday. 

This feature adds to the advanced logic you can use in Automations to help you scale your workflows. Try it out for yourself in your base and let us know how you’re planning on using this new feature below! For more information and examples, take a look at our support article.

A few common questions:

Can I combine conditional groups with repeat groups in Automations?
No, these are both considered advanced logic, which are currently always added at the end of an Automation. Only one type of advanced logic can be used at a time, and they cannot be combined together.

How does this count towards my total Automations execution limit?
Using a repeat group will not count as additional Automation execution limits, so you can now do more within the same automation.

[Levande_Video]

This is so cool! Thank you very much 🙂

[Lena_Osorio-Gem]

Exciting 😃! Love Airtable

[lizfitz]

Already using and loving this new feature, thank you!!!

[ScottWorld]

Hi @Helen_Zeng ,

Some features that we would really like to see in Automations:

Sorting records in automations: All of Airtable’s automation actions, including finding records and the new looping actions, will always return records in a completely random & unpredictable order. What automations really need is a “Sort Records” action.

Automation error notifications: We should be able to specify who gets email notifications for automation errors. Right now, error messages get sent to the last person who edited the automation. 🤦🏻‍♂️ This is almost never the person who should be receiving the error notifications. 

The ability to pay for more automation runs, without having to pay $9,000+ per year for Enterprise. And even enterprise has limits on automation runs, without the ability to pay for more records or more automation runs. If you hit the limit, all automations are disabled until the next month. This is one of the top 10 reasons that people switch to Make, because you can easily pay for more runs if you hit the maximum. 

We are also keeping a list of general Airtable feature requests here.

[MCC]

Hi Helen, 

Thanks for sharing this. I am trialling this feature for my database hoping to send out a list of assigned tasks to each member of my team every Monday. My issue that I am having now is - at the "Find record" stage, Airtable found 3 tasks that is due within the next week, and therefore it sends 3 same email to the same team member assigned to that 3 tasks. How could I amend this?

[Yago_Stecher1]

I found that repeating groups cap at 100 cycles, is that so?

For example: I have an automation that creates records based on a "Find records" action, that looks up a view containing 144 records. I get 100 records in return, and the run history just says success in 100 steps. No warning of running out of cycles or something.

[Flavien_Bonnevi]

Thanks for this great feature, but why cannot we add other actions after a repeating group or a conditional logic groups ? Use-case is quite trivial : you want to update a task/project status, for exemple, based on the realization of the automation : today you cannot add this "update record action" at the end. Is there any technical limit in Airtable ? Would be really great. Thanks