I run an creative agency that contracts several freelancers at any given moment. Currently, we have an Airtable base for managing the recruitment and onboarding pipeline for the freelancers. We’d also like to start managing the invoices from the freelancers through Airtable as well.
At the moment, it’s a massive headache collecting bank account information and parsing individual invoices as everyone formats their information differently. We’re hoping there’s an opportunity here to use Airtable forms to collect the data, link it to the existing records, and then output neat, consistent looking invoices using the page designer block.
Problem is, the primary field in the ‘Freelancer’ base are the names of every freelancer we work with, and that’s sensitive information we can’t show externally. We thought about changing the primary field in the base to a sequential number ID, but that seems like it would create problems of its own. So the question is, how can we get freelancers to enter their own information and have it link it to our existing records without having to expose them to sensitive information?
For additional context, here are the key columns in the main table:
|Full Name|Status|Email|Portfolio / Website|Current Project|
Here’s what we need for their bank information, which is a one-time input we will need simultaneously with their first invoice:
|Legal Name|Account Number|Personal Address|Bank Name|Bank Swift Code|Bank Address|
And lastly the data format for individual invoices:
|Date|Project|Description|Quantity|Rate|Total|
I’m guessing email is actually the best candidate data field for tying everything together and validating against since legal names might differ from the name we have on file - but the question remains: how can we validate or match without exposing sensitive information? Thanks for the help all!
