First time user, many questions. Relationships, start and end dates, etc

[John_Marvin]

Hello,

We have five associations that combine to form one large association.

I need to be able to search people by work site, association, title etc.

I also need to be able to start and end date and title for a person. Say a person is treasurer from 2018-2020 and also a committee chair from 2018-2020, then they are president from 2020-2022, what is the best way to go about this?

I will need to be able to pull data on who past/current presidents, treasurers, etc were not only by association, but sometimes will need to know all the currently held positions in the larger combined association.

Also, is it possible to make a sign in sheet form for board meetings that would tally the number of times a person signed into a meeting throughout the year? Maybe integrations are necessary for this?

I also need to keep track of donated and used days for a sick leave bank between all members.

I’ll add more questions as I think of them.

Thanks for any and all help!

[JonathanBowen]

Hi @John_Marvin - my recommended approach when starting a base from scratch is to think about the entities and associated data you want to track. Generally speaking, an entity will have its own table in the base. Just based on your note above, I think you might have entities such as

• Associations - fields: name (address?, website? etc)
• Members - fields: name, link to association (email, phone, address etc)
• Positions - fields: position name, link to member, link to association, start year, end year

By keeping these as separate entities you can also record additional information in the right place (e.g. email, phone number on the member), but accessible in related places (lookup email address in the Positions table for easy access).

You might also have tables/entities for meetings (linked to association), donated days (linked to member).

Have a look in the Airtable docs for some initial pointers:

Airtable - Support

Getting started: tables, records, and fields

So you've just made your first new base—now it's time to make it your own! First, we'll learn about the different parts of a base, then, we'll learn how you can customize each of them to fit your n...

Feels like links and lookups might feature in your base, so these might be useful too:

Airtable - Support

Linked record fields

A linked record field allows you to represent the relationships between related records by creating links between them. This is particularly helpful when you have multiple tables of related items o...

Airtable - Support

Guide to formula, lookup, rollup, and other computed fields

Computed fields (columns) are special field types where the values in the field are computed by Airtable automatically, rather than directly edited by users. These can be fields that allow you to c...

Hope this helps. Post any further questions back to the community too.

JB

[John_Marvin]

Thank you Jonathan. That is definitely some helpful insight into the direction I should be going.

Anybody have any insight on creating a sign in sheet for meetings that would tie into a persons record?

Thanks!