Hello lovely Airtable Community!
Here’s my conundrum - I work for a not-for-profit trying to give locals on a low budget access to food at low cost.
We’re using Airtable to log who comes, when, what food they take, and how much they pay - we’re essentially using an Airtable form as a shop “till” of sorts, using a network of linked fields and formulas that allow our Shop team to log all this info straight onto our Airtable database.
The problem we have is that if someone wants to collect two of one food item, the person using the Shop Form has to submit the form twice, once with the bulk of what they’ve collected, and again with any duplicates, as the form won’t allow the same Linked Record to be selected more than once.
This really slows things down, and while it’s not the end of the world, I’ve had a few requests from the team for this to change, if it can.
I’ve currently got one Tab called “Transactions”, which contains the Shop Form view, and another Tab called “Food Stock”. The two are linked so that if you enter into the form “Jane Smith collected one bottle of milk and one loaf of bread”, the Food Stock tab will keep a running count of how many bottles of milk and loaves of bread we’ve sold (I’m simplifying this a bit for narrative purposes, but that’s the gist - the whole Base also records what food Jane Smith has collected over time, and how much she’s paid, both in different Tabs).
Is there a way I can re-format this to allow people to select the same food item twice on the Shop Form?
I have considered just adding a second entry to the Stock List for each food item, but that would make reporting on stock sold a bit of a trial, so I’d rather use that as a last resort.
Any suggestions on how Airtable may be able to do this would be very much appreciated. I’m very much aware that there is other software better suited for this purpose, but let’s just say that where we are now is the product of gradual evolution, and it’s not quite as much of a faff to warrant a complete overhaul. Yet.
Thank you! :slightly_smiling_face:
