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Re: Automatically append to invoice ID (e.g. A, B, etc) if duplicates

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Grace_Yeh
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

First time posting here as a new user of Airtable and I’d really appreciate some help -

Context: I have two tables - Submission and Final. Submission data is fed from a form which is completed by customer for each book. A customer will usually enter multiple books which then roll up into one submission that populates the Final table (i.e. one submission = one invoice). It was working great when I roll up using a unique ID (Invoice ID) made up of the customer’s initials + date. However, occasionally a customer will want to put in 1+ submission on the same day. So I end up with duplicate invoice IDs that then all roll up into one invoice - which I do not want. I want to separate these same-day submissions and send separate invoices (emails) for each.

Right now I’m trying to append to the invoice ID like how I would do it manually, e.g. GS-091522A, GS-091522B, etc. But I’m unable to figure this out as an automation. This is what I have:
image
This appends A to the first of the multi submissions. Then I try to add a conditional action for the subsequent submissions, like this:
image

But then the first step runs again on the second submission which ends up being appended A as well:
image

I don’t know if there is a way to build the conditional action somewhere between trigger and first step? Or maybe there are other ways to achieve this?

2 Replies 2

Welcome to the community, @Grace_Yeh!

Airtable is not great with conditional automations, because it can only go down ONE conditional path per automation. What this means is that you will need to build MULTIPLE conditional paths in your automation to handle this situation.

So what you could do is add a “Find Records” action to search on the Invoice ID.Then, start creating conditional paths.

One of your conditional paths would be this:

If the “length” of the “Find Records” action is greater than 1, then it means that that Invoice ID has been entered before… and then you can use the “Update Record” action to mark the original record as a duplicate in some way. (Maybe check a checkbox or something like that.)

Hope this helps! :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks so much for the quick reply! Will try that.