Equipment Bundles within Equipment Check Out/Check In System

[VCC_Online]

Hello! I found this post: Help tracking check in/out equipment for our small video studio using barcodes - and started to build our own equipment inventory check out/check-in system (thank you Ben.Young for creating this!).

I’m looking to expand this further to allow checking out of equipment bundles. Currently, our base has “Individual Equipment” and we’d like to have Equipment Bundles as an option as well. We’d like the option to either check out individual equipment or an equipment bundle (and every individual equipment within that equipment bundle would also be checked out and not available when that bundle is checked out but then available when that bundle is checked back in).

I started to try this on as a separate table but got stuck - would love any help with this! Here’s our current Airtable Base: https://airtable.com/shrEeKJCY9HBaYhKc (it’s a testing one for sharing on this forum).

Thanks!

[Ben_Young1]

Hey @VCC_Online!

This is interesting!
I’m thinking in the abstract, but I would create two tables.

If you’re looking at base I shared in that original post, you will see the Equipment table and the Equipment Checkouts table that I had initially created.

To handle the equipment bundles, I would create a new table.
Each record will be for a single bundle, and you’ll want to link the individual pieces of equipment to their related bundle.

You can use a similar setup to prevent people from checking out bundles and equipment that isn’t available.

Specifically, if a piece of equipment is in a bundle, but that bundle is checked out, then the equipment in that bundle will be unavailable for you to individually checkout.

The OP in the previous thread you referenced wanted to use a web form to handle people checking equipment in or out.
If you were going to use the web form approach, you would add a new linked record field that points to the bundles’ table.

Not sure if that makes sense; I just woke up.

Let me know if I sound crazy or if you want to dig more into the details.

[VCC_Online]

Appreciate you jumping on today!

That’s what I was thinking too. I like the reality of having an Equipments table and then a Bundles table. We have a web form in the “Equipments Checkout” table - I’d love for someone to either be able to check out individual equipment or a bundle. And yes to what this: “Specifically, if a piece of equipment is in a bundle, but that bundle is checked out, then the equipment in that bundle will be unavailable for you to individually checkout.”

I’m not as familiar with Airtable - just getting started in the last 3-6 months. Would love any help you could give! Thank you!

[VCC_Online]

Also, this might be a stretch idea (not sure if Airtable can even do this) - we’d love to be able to schedule equipment/bundle check-outs (I found this platform - Equipment Scheduling Software - Cheqroom - but would rather use Airtable because we don’t need something as complex as Cheqroom)