Increase Record Templates Limits

[Yonatan_Langer]

Hi everyone, 

you might have seen the new Record Templates feature, which is sooo helpful. However it comes with a limit of creating 100 records per base in Pro Account. 

We are a small company, and need this feature to automate our processes, and cant go to Enterprise account. 

So I was wondering about ways to keep using the Record Template feature beyond the 100 record limit. 

The issue is that we need to save different working templates for different cases in our business processes but we dont actually use them all the time, or even at the same time. Having a record template is for us a way to have transparent processes saved, and they get rolled out when triggered. So we actually need to save way more options for Record Templates than 100. 

1. Idea

Create different other bases with each 100 record template records, and sync the bases after the templates were used. This can already work, but it seems a bit complicated

2. Create Record Templates only with Automation and delete the template after it was used

The idea is to not save Record Templates, but instead create the template in the moment it gets selected (by any condition, like single select field). In that moment we would tell Airtable to create a specific record template, with the pre-specified tasks and to run all the tasks, and after to delete the template again. This way more templates could be pre-defined but dont actually get saved. Any ideas if this is possible, with scripting?

Looking forward to your feedback and ideas

Best

Yonatan

[ScottWorld]

Unfortunately, your other ideas may not work, because you may also hit up against the other built-in limitations from Airtable as well.

For example: Airtable’s automations can only have up to 25 actions in them, you can only have 50 automations in a base, and you can only find up to 100 records in an action. Syncing has major limitations as well.

You might be able to get away with using the “find records” action multiple times in an automation and then pasting the found arrays into a linked record field. This is a technique that I describe for sending emails in this podcast episode.

However, if that doesn’t do the trick for you, the good news is that people have been building their own customized record template automations for years before any of these options were available to us.

But they can only be done in one of two ways:

1. The high-code way: Writing custom JavaScripts to do this.

2. The low-code/no-code way: Using a low-code automation tool like Make to do this. (I highly recommend Make over Zapier, because Zapier has severe limitations like Airtable does. For example, Zapier only lets you have 3 conditional paths per automation.)

Either one of these ways would take several hours to setup, but once it’s setup, it would be super super easy for your users to create, edit, manage, and run their own record templates in the future.

Because it’s such a lengthy & complicated setup that would take a few hours, I can’t give you all the step-by-step instructions here on how to do it here. But if you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you create this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld 

p.s. Also, if you go with the #2 option above: There can be a bit of a learning curve with Make, which is why I created this basic navigation video for Make, along with providing the link to Make’s free training courses.

[Stephen_Orr1]

While normally I'd say that you can replicate record template functionality with a junction table approach + an Airtable no-code automation, this also has a limit of 100 records created per automation.

You might also consider splitting off subtasks/"records that can be grouped under parent records" to a table that is linked to your record template table and store these in the record template in a linked record field. Or reduce the number of records/tasks that a business process entails using a long text field + rich text formatting and checklists for more granular details.

Hope that helps!
-Stephen