Automatic number fill down a field

[Ruby_Sniderman]

Hi,

I am creating a cash float in Airtable. I have a field called ‘Start of Day Cash’ that gets entered via Form. However, we now have remote days where people are not on site to count cash. Is it possible to have the record be the same as previous entries automatically UNLESS somebody fills out the Form to update it with a new number. Then all the subsequent entries would change to that updated number via Form.

Thank you!

[ScottWorld]

Welcome to the community, @Ruby_Sniderman!

If you’re adding new records via a form, then the only way you could do this would be by pre-filling your form with the value you’re looking for, and then the person filling out the form could overwrite it with a different value if they wanted to.

You can learn more about prefilling forms here:

Airtable - Support

Prefilling a form

When making an Airtable form, you can use prefill_ parameters in the URL of the form to prefill specific fields. Find the URL for the form you wish to prefill. Once you get the form URL, you can ...

[Ruby_Sniderman]

Thanks for the reply! I feel like I didn’t explain it properly! We have some days where folks will fill our a form on records the Start of Day Cash (when they’re working in the onsite). But there are days were they’ll be at home and will not fill out a form to indicate the Start of Day cash. However in the Grid, I want the Start of Day Cash from the previous day that they filled out with the Form to carry down to each records, until they enter a new Form to get a new value for Start of Day Cash. Hope that makes more sense?

[Ruby_Sniderman]

Essentially I am trying to autofill a field from prior values in the same column, until a new form changes that value and then the autofill continues :slightly_smiling_face:

[ScottWorld]

The problem is that forms can’t update existing values nor pull values from other records — forms are always “blank entities” that can only create new records, and nothing else.

Even Airtable’s interface itself doesn’t have a way to autofill new records based on the value of previous records, unless you group your records by that value. Then, all records in that group automatically receive that group’s value. If you change the value, the record will switch to another group.

For anything more advanced, you would probably need to turn to a custom JavaScript with the scripting block.

But if you’re looking for something like a “running balance” like in a checkbook register, there’s no built-in way to do that. You would probably need to script that sort of thing separately.

[Ruby_Sniderman]

sigh. ok thank you! manual it is!

[ScottWorld]

@Ruby_Sniderman

Actually, you might be able to do something along the lines of what you’re looking for with linked record fields (instead of grouping records).

You would create another table that is simply designed for the purpose of keeping track of each day’s cash balance. So, each record in this new table would simply have a date and a balance.

Then, back in your original table, every time you create a new record, you would manually link to the previous day’s record from that other table, which would then lookup the previous day’s cash balance.

When you first set this up, this would be a manual linking process. But then, you could work on automating this linking process with a JavaScript or by using an external automation tool (like Integromat).

You would need to automate it the other way, too:

At the end of each day, your current table would need to send the nightly balance into the other table as a new record there, so it would be ready to be pulled in again the next morning.

That would likely do the trick.