Using Airtable to settle utilities with tenants

[Mike3]

Hi Guys, 

I'd like to use Airtable to build a utility settlement tool with the tenants. My tenants pay an advance for utility every 6 months; after 6 months (this period might differ), I record the meter reading and fixed and variable utility prices (the utility prices might differ between months, it's not common, though) calculate how much they should pay vs. how much they paid in an advance. I have 6 tenants. I use it for the following utilities: electricity, heating, and water. I've been doing it in Google Sheets so far, but AirTable interfaces would be useful for me. I'm trying to figure out the tool's structure: if I should put the dates of the readings in rows and the utility kind in columns or the other way around. 

Do you think it makes sense to use Airtable for this purpose? 

Thanks for your help.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, assuming you want them to only have access to the interface and not the base, you'll need to have a paid plan

If you want them to be able to make updates to the data one thing to note is that you'll need to pay for each account, and so with 6 tenants would cost 24 * 6 per month.  You can try to get around this problem by getting users to fill out a form and use automations to update a record, and Airtable has a guide for that here: https://support.airtable.com/docs/use-case-update-records-via-a-form

You can also try to use third party software like Fillout.com to allow people to update the records too, and so you'd provide a link to the Fillout form in your Interface, and your tenants would update the data via Fillout

If you want to prevent them from seeing each other, you'll need to use a Business and above plan too: https://support.airtable.com/docs/managing-and-sharing-interfaces#setting-collaborator-visibility
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You can also explore using Airtable as a backend and using a third party tool like Softr, noloco, etc as a front end as it'd be cheaper

[Mike3]

Hi The Time Saving Co,

thanks for your feedback. I digged into Softr, and it seems a nice piece of SaaS 🙂 

I was wondering, may you have any advice about how to structure the data in the Airtable?:

- Should I put the dates of the readings in rows and the utility kind in columns or the other way around? 

- Should there be a separate table for each tenant and for the prices of all the media?

- How to update the readings each month or quarter ?

Thanks 🙂

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm I think I'd do each date as a single row and would have all tenants in one table.  I think I'd also have one table just for all utility prices, where each record represented a single utility, price, and the date period for that price.  I'd then link that to the "Reading" record in order to calculate the total

For how to update the readings, I think I'd use an Interface specifically built for that to make it easier for me.  Given that the utilities are fixed, I'd create a record template that would help me create one record per utility that I could apply to the tenant, and then I'd be able to fill out the readings easily.  https://support.airtable.com/docs/using-record-templates-in-airtable

[Mike3]

Thanks TheTimeSavingCo, 

I appreciate your advice.