issue in Automation with condition process

[Emily_Cooley]

I have a group database on airtable that I am trying to clean up and make more efficient using some automations.  Here is the flow: input group details into database, send a bid, send a contract, input into pms, get rooming list and input into pms,  send invoice, receive credit card authorization, take payment, send front desk instructions, send invoice for commissions, depart the group.  Here are my thoughts that I would like input on from the folks who know their stuff.  

1.  Is it better to manage the flow through views or tables? My thought was to have all of the data that I need in a 'group details' table, then have a 'bid/contract', 'roominglist', 'Invoice' and 'FD instruction' tables.  I would then automatically move it through each table of the process based on a check mark or an attachment of a contract for instance. This would keep it clean as each step would then have it's own calculations that would pull from the data on the 'group detail' table and I could easily see which group was in each stage of the process. I could then set up an automated notification for any step that is overdue from those process tables.

2. I have spent a bit of time looking at options for automating the creation and emailing of the documents of my process (contract, invoice and FD instructions) I am trying to not spend extra money on this and it seems that Make, Zapier and Documint for example have free plans that are of course limited.  I need to be able to customize the document with dynamic tables of group tour information as the table will vary between 1 tour entry and 15 entries.   Then email it as a pdf.  What do you suggest would be the best way to go?

Thank you!!!

[TheTimeSavingCo]

re: views vs tables

This might really come down to personal preference / workflows I'm afraid.  Personally if I have multiple tables that are one-to-one links to each other, then I'd rather have them all in one table and handle stuff via views instead of having to potentially pull data into different tables on the fly

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re: document creation

You may want to consider DocsAutomator which allows you to generate and upload an attachment into Airtable on the free plan (20 docs a month), and then you'd use Airtable to send out the emails.  Documint's paid plan has an equivalent for uploading into Airtable too I think.  Either of these options would allow you to bypass the need for Make/Zapier to create/send out the PDFs

Assuming you do need a third party automation tool for some reason, Make's probably the way to go here as it allows you to use column IDs in your scenarios while Zapier doesn't (This means that changes to field names for fields you're using in your Make scenario won't cause your automation to break).  Zapier's got a much gentler learning curve and you can pick it up and start using it immediately though, whereas with Make the learning curve is a bit steeper