Hey! Airtable has the concept of a unique record baked in to its design.

If you need phone-number to be unique I’d recommend that you do a quick check via Zapier to ensure that the number is unique, and if it is, add the record, if it isn’t you would want to update the existing record.

I will say though, that using phone number as a unique record ID is normally not a good idea, because phone numbers are liable to change.

Airtable handles record ids a little differently from other database systems.

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  Each record has a “primary field” that is displayed as the first column in a grid view. It is also the field that is displayed when linking records. This “primary field” should be unique for a good database design, but Airtable does not enforce uniqueness, and it is very possible to have duplicates and blank values in the “primary field”.

  
  
  



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  Each record also has an internal record id for each record that you cannot alter. You can see it by creating a formula field with the function RECORD_ID(). You will not need this record id unless you are using one of the APIs.

  
  
  

If you want to use a phone number as the “primary field” you can set the primary field type to a phone number. Or if you have an existing field for the phone number, you can use a formula as the “primary field”.

If you have a Pro subscription, you can also used the Dedupe block to check for duplicates.