2. Design your workflow

[Mikayla_LaRosa]

Welcome to the second stage!

In the first stage, we talked about how data forms the foundation for your team’s workflow in Airtable. Now, you’re ready to learn how to bring that data to life by mapping out the steps your team will take to get their work done.

• Read guide
• Share your feedback

Have questions about the concepts covered in this stage of the guide? Reply to this post and our community is here to help!

[Cara_Sawai]

@Dustin_Smith Hi Dustin! I’ve had an epiphany moment on a topic that’s been on my brain for awhile. The membership fee is charged per company and NOT by individual. So I’ve finally come to realize that I should have a separate tab for the companies, listing out their information (Company name, website, CEO, address, etc.). Currently I’ve been linking the record (Company name) to all of the tabs but should I be using that as the unique identifier? Or should I concatenate something like Company Name and Contact name?

As i mentioned earlier I manage an association of family owned businesses. We track their membership history (years they joined, members of the family - also known as affiliates, basic information - address, email, phone, if they paid their dues) and also their attendance to our programs (registration information/attendance, events the different chapters are holding, budget information, documentation that’s been filed, lunch orders, RSVPs etc.)

Wanted to get your opinion if I should have a separate base for events and separate base for contacts? The events base would be to track the different programs (location, date, budget etc) also registration for that event.

You can link between bases now right?

[Cara_Sawai]

@Dustin_Smith

2nd part to this… for our entrepreneurship center we want to track the progression of our students. Similar I guess to the association? We’d want to know the student or mentor or volunteer’s involvement. Such as: programs they’ve participated in, companies they’ve started or are a part of, etc.

We have a student leadership program we’re trying to build out. Each year a student participates they may have a different role, however we’d like to see what they’ve done over the years (time frame as well as position). The best way to track it is to have each year that they participate a new record?

[Dustin_Smith]

Congrats on the epiphany @Cara_Sawai! I love noodling on stuff like this and then having that :bulb: moment that helps me turn the problem on its side.

Currently I’ve been linking the record (Company name) to all of the tabs but should I be using that as the unique identifier? Or should I concatenate something like Company Name and Contact name?

This is totally your choice, but I’ll say that I see a lot of people go with the concatenation (formula) route for a variety of reasons. The biggest one being since the primary field is always anchored as the left-most field it’s easy if the values give a hint as to the context of the record vs. a random number.

Wanted to get your opinion if I should have a separate base for events and separate base for contacts? The events base would be to track the different programs (location, date, budget etc) also registration for that event.
You can link between bases now right?

Yes! Syncing tables between bases is totally doable. However, I’d actually recommend starting with a single base for all of this information and use tables to keep them separate and linked records to do the lookups. While it’s possible you might end-up expanding to the point where you need/should use more than one base, starting with a single one and using linked records is often easier/faster at the start of a project. Also, there is a limit to how many tables you can sync across bases depending on the Airtable plan you are on. I’m always a fan of seeing how far folks can get without hitting account limits before scaling up to bigger features.

[Dustin_Smith]

@Cara_Sawai follow-up to your second question:

Each year a student participates they may have a different role, however we’d like to see what they’ve done over the years (time frame as well as position). The best way to track it is to have each year that they participate a new record?

I can see this taking several shapes design-wise, but I think if you had a students table, a programs table, and then a third table is somewhat of an events in the sense of “when something took place” you could track everytime (sounds like yearly cadence) a student participated in a specific program. Depending on how many roles and what information you needed about them you could potentially even build a roles table as well. In this sense your “events” table simply becomes a ledger of who did what and when and in what capacity. What do you think? Would that give you the view of the information that would be helpful?

[Elza_Lambergs]

Happy August, everyone! Just dropping by to celebrate those of you, who have completed the second stage in our guide. Special thanks to creators like @Martha_King and @Cara_Sawai for sharing their questions and feedback with us :star_struck:

If you’re wondering whether to jump in, the second stage is all about helping you map your own workflow into an Airtable base. You’ll learn answers to questions like…

• How many tables should I set up?
• What fields do I need for my workflow?
• Which stakeholders should I invite to my base?
• What’s the best way to import my data from other tools?
• What are common best practices when designing my base?

Check out the links to this stage below – and as always, we’d love to hear your feedback! :wave:

• Read the guide
• Share your feedback

[Cara_Sawai]

Thanks so much for the insight! Sorry we had some programming going on so it was a little hectic in July. That does sound like a good solution. Then it would be easy for us to filter dates or time frame or by position if we wanted to for a particular time frame.

I’ll be building out my airtable more and looking to do more financial tracking/budget for our events so I’m sure i’ll be submitting more questions soon! Thanks again for your time!!

[Elza_Lambergs]

Hey Cara! No worries – we’re just happy to hear that this has been a helpful resource for you!

We have some templates that may be a useful starting point for your event tracking base and this section of our guide can help you customize them further to your specific needs.

Please do let us know how it’s going as you build and reach out with any questions :slightly_smiling_face:

[Cara_Sawai]

Hi!

Second question… I have an events tab, budget tab, and financials tab.

The events tab list all of our events for the year.
Financial tab lists all financial (debts and credits) transactions. These columns are pretty simple: Event date (linked field), amount, notes, attachments, payee etc.
Budget tab is our total budget for each event (actual and budgeted amounts for each category).

The finances and budgets are linked to the events tab by event date.

However, wanted to double check that I would need to link the finances and budgets tabs together in order to use the rollup function? I wouldn’t be able to use a look up fields since they are both linked to the events tab?

I was wondering if there’s a better way to do this? Should I have the budget items (category, actual amount, budgeted amount) in the events tab instead? Just seems like there would be a lot of columns within the events tab although I could use the views to format them.

[Elza_Lambergs]

Hi @Cara_Sawai, good question and awesome to hear that you’re making great use of linked records!

In order to use a rollup field and calculate something like “spend to date” in your Budget table, you’re right in that you’d need to set up a linked record field first. When you do that, you can link all of the transactions for that particular event first and then add a rollup field that gives you the total sum. Totally agreed that this approach is a better option than combining tables and setting up more fields.

This event budgeting template may be a helpful reference point. It sounds like the setup is quite similar to your base. Either way, hope this helps and let me know which method you end up going with!