Hello and Good Day to All,
As the header suggests I’m looking for some advice as to how to proceed with my project.
A bit of background. My wife started making custom jewelry for herself a few years ago. One thing led to another and now she’s taken her hobby and expanded it into a small-ish side business. She currently uses Excel to keep track of everything related to her hobby/business. I’ve even jumped on board with a Laser Engraver/Cutter and am making items for her to sell as well. (Plus it’s a frickin laser and really fun).
We both have a lot of experience with Excel and next to no experience with Airtable. I started out looking for an inventory management program that we could tweak to our needs. I couldn’t really find anything and then I stumbled upon Airtable. I already have a decent-ish handle on my inventory including setting up a form that we can easily enter in new items to sell. I have our items categorized by item type (earrings, ornaments, etc) and then sub-categorized (Christmas, Holloween, etc.) so I feel that I have a okay handle on this part of Airtable.
The next step of my project with Airtable is to figure out how to use it with her various events/markets that she sells her jewelry at. I would like to be able to select items that we are selling at each event and mark them as sold somehow. My thoughts on this had me using a form (somehow) to add a sold marker to each item sold. Ideally, we could pull up the form, search for whatever item we are selling and check a box for “sold”. (I’m unsure if this type of search functionality exists within Airtable forms) One issue that I’m having is that we might sell multiples of the same item during an event/market so we need to be able to be able to mark the same unit as “sold” multiple times. I though at one point was to assign something a rating, update said rating each time that item is sold, and then count the ratings at the end of the event/market.
I’m having a hard time not thinking in “Excel” while I’m trying to figure out how to do this. I could very easily make a duplicate base for each event. But after doing some research (i.e. watching a bunch of YT vids and perusing this forum) I realized that this isn’t a very “elegant” solution and not really the correct way to use a database program. This also doesn’t help me with finding an easier way to mark something as sold. If you haven’t figured this out yet, I’m all about making this as easy on my wife (and therefore myself) as possible.
At this time I’m not looking to spend a ton of money on a subscription. If this project of hers starts growing (even more than it has in the last 18 months) then we might look into expanding our Airtable usage, say for syncing to outside sources. But for the moment I’m hoping that the free version of Airtable should get us what we need.
Thanks in advance for any and all help/suggestions that you might come up with and have a great and safe day.