Hoping to use Airtable for a brewery/beer contact database

[Jason_Sweeney]

We work with breweries and their beers and want to have very extensive fields for both. Thing is we also work on timelines with breweries and want to have some sort of reminder/dashboard system where we can track their responses and deadlines, etc. Multiple users will be using it.

We were hoping to also have the ability to store emails we sent from Outlook into a given contact’s record. I believe that is possible but I wanted to hear from others how well that works.

Basically what we are looking for in a custom relationship database with some contact management features. Airtable is the first product I’m looking at and hope it suits us because it looks very slick and affordable.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Undoubtedly, Airtable can do what you need it to. You might find you need some other third-party integrations if you come to a point of wanting robust automation, but Airtable integrates quite well with a lot of web services, and acts as an excellent back end for your data, and a pretty darn good front end for entering and manipulating that data as well.

Dashboard is doable for sure. Automated reminders might need some help from outside.

Only one I’m not sure of is storing emails – what exactly is meant by that? In what format do you want to store emails with a Client’s record? Just the text-content and a time-stamp? An outlook file that opens the email in outlook?

[syncbases_com]

Yea i do that as well, but using gmail. Zapier have this kind of integration.

[Jason_Sweeney]

Encouraging to hear.
We were thinking a text copy of the email would be stored with a given contact’s email in Airtable. I realize that can be ugly and doesn’t include attachments, etc.
The idea is instead of us manually having to update when we reached out to a contact or what was said, it stores it automatically by some sort of bcc mechanism.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Ya, that’s possible, but you’ll have to use another web service, such as Zapier, like @syncbases.com mentioned to accomplish that. And you should be able to get attachments in there as well even.

[syncbases_com]

it’s very handy as once you have your mail in airtable, you can make a calendar view and some chart. Plus combine with sendgrid block for fast mailing