Tracking which services have been delivered - help?

[Andi_Fear-Ross]

Hi
I am quite new to airtable, so if this question has been posted before, please point me in the right direction, as I couldn’t find the answer when searching.

Our small business provides professional services to clients. I am trying to use airtable to make sure we deliver those services agreed in the contracts.
Typically a client might have 4-7 different services across a year which would be grouped into one contract for monthly payments and delivered across a year on dates as agreed - then would get a new contract for the next year with similar or different services.
In my base I have a table for Companies (and one for contacts as quite a few people within each company) and then one for Contracts as each company could have many contracts over a lifetime.
In the Contracts table, I record the start and end date of the contract, the monthly payment, attach a copy of the agreement and link it to the comapny name from the Company table. However I would like to be able to do the following:

1. enter the new contract details into the database to show the services that need to be delivered
2. add/track proposed delivery dates (one by one - once agreed with the client) - and have this link to a calendar view (we use google)
3. if the proposed service date change, update it (preferably from the calendar view if this is possible)
4. be able to simply check off when each service is actually delivered (from the calendar(?))
5. Have it automatically show which services are still outstanding (and be able to see if they have a proposed date or not).

Can airtable do this? What is the best way in terms of fields etc? Am I expecting too much, or is there a better/different product?

Not sure if it’s relevant, but currently lots of services get postponed so often delivered after the contracted period. Also, it would be great to record the results of some services (surveys etc) for comparison year to year.

Many thanks in advance for any advice.

[augmented]

Hi Andi. I would do this with a third table (Contract Items) to hold contract items. You would have a link field back to the contract in the Contracts table, so you can group items by contract id.

Some other fields like

Item description
Delivery date
Status - not started, in progress, complete

will of course be necessary. Then you can add some automations to notify you when an item is nearly delivery date (and not started) or way past delivery date and not complete, for example.

At this point you can also add lookup fields back in Contracts to pull in statuses (for example) so that you can know when the entire contract is delivered.

For surveys, I would use another table to collect them, but fire them off from an automation in the Contract Items table when you complete a service (or entire contract). You can customize the link to the form in the other table, that you send in the automation email, so it automatically links to the service (at least I’m pretty sure you can).

Hope this helps.

[Bill_French]

Hi @Andi_Fear-Ross, and welcome to the community!

Andi_Fear-Ross:

Can airtable do this? What is the best way in terms of fields etc? Am I expecting too much, …

Yes, Airtable can meet all of these requirements and because it can and because Covid is impacting the globe, there’s a gold-rush of sorts happening and Airtable consultants are in high demand presently. But to get their attention, I recommend adding the Hire a consultant tag to this post to see if you can attract some advice and possibly a helping hand.

My advice…

• Begin by focusing solely on the key requirement - contract obligations fulfilment and use Airtable to do that without the ultimate integrated features, calendar, tc. It’s always wise to crawl before running because you don’t really know all the possibilities with Airtable just yet.
• Look at the collection of free bases that Airtable provides in the Marketplace and review the Universe to learn and possibly find something close to your solution vision. The scheduler app is likely to demonstrate how to approach tracking future contract milestones.

[ScottWorld]

Bill.French:

But to get their attention, I recommend adding the Hire a consultant tag to this post to see if you can attract some advice and possibly a helping hand.

@Andi_Fear-Ross If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with your system, please feel free to contact me through my website at ScottWorld.com.