Is Airtable suitable for my project?

[cpanimation]

Hi,

I'm in need of a solution for a project and I was contemplating using Airtable. I tried a few things but it's not working. Can you help me figure out if Airtable is suitable for my project ?

Here are the details :

I have a table that lists various criteria (e.g., Criterion A, Criterion B, Criterion C, etc.). Each criterion is divided into sub-criteria (e.g., for Criterion A, the sub-criteria might be "Option 1," "Option 2," etc.). For each sub-criterion, there is a correspondence with different funders (e.g., "Criterion A = Option 1" → Funder X: no, Funder Y: yes, etc.).

Next, I have another table containing projects. In this table, each project has specific criteria filled out. These criteria determine whether a funder responds "yes" or "no" for the given project.

A third table aggregates the funders' responses for each project. The rule is as follows: if a funder responds "no" to any of the criteria, their final response for the project is "no".

Finally, a summary table compiles the final responses of all funders for each project. Project owners receive a recap in the form of a PDF. This PDF lists the funders' responses and, in the case of a positive response, includes a contact address for further steps.

Thanks in advance for your help!!

[Ron_Daniel]

@cpanimation - it sounds like Airtable is ideal for nearly everything you're describing. The one exception I see is the automatic generation and emailing of a PDF recap. I believe you'd have to use a third-party integration like DocuMint or Make to get that last part accomplished.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Airtable's pretty much just a database tool and so should be fine for what you're trying to do.  I got a bit confused reading your setup though so I'm not too sure about that.  Could you talk more broadly about your business case and what you're trying to do?

For the PDF bit, if you're okay with some manual work check out Airtable's Page Designer extension.  If you want it to be fully automatic, I'd recommend DocsAutomator: support is great and the free tier has automation scripts to let you generate and upload PDFs automatically into your table, and you could then have another automation to send out said PDFs via email

[cpanimation]

Thank you for your response! I am currently facing challenges with referencing multiple tables and incorporating formulas effectively.

To give you a clearer picture of what I’m working on: Our team conducts quarterly simulations to assess financing possibilities for special housing projects. Each cycle, we analyze approximately 30 projects. For each project, the manager of said project completes a form detailing its status, target beneficiaries, location, and other relevant information.

Using Excel formulas, we compare this project data against the criteria of 10 financing institutions. If a project meets a criterion for a given institution, it is marked as "yes" in a separate table. We then aggregate the total number of "yes" and "no" responses for each institution. If a single criterion is marked as "no," the project is deemed ineligible for that institution.

hope it's helpful...

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Interesting!  Yeah, that makes sense.  Does the criteria for the financing institutions change?  Is the criteria different for each institution?

You mentioned a third table that aggregates each institutions response to each project.  So that's a table where each record is linked to a single project and a single institution, I take it?  And you do lookups to pull all the relevant project data and institution criteria, and you're using formulas to compare them and output the result?

If you could talk more about the issues you're facing and provide some screenshots of your table structure I can see what I can do to help!

[cpanimation]

Thanks again 🙏

I don't have screenshots of my tables. I deleted most of them as it wasn't working. I did do a diagram to illustrate what we are doing now and the logic I'm trying to implement on Airtable. Since we have at least 30 projects each time and around 90 criteria for all the institutions I find it hard to manage on Airtable. I tried to use formulas but I can't use it on linked column so I have tons of empty columns just to get to 1 criteria, if that makes sense.

Again, thank you for all your help!! And sorry for the mistakes, English isn't my first language.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Ahh, yeah.  Setting up a system to do varying checks like this can get tricky.  If you've got a JS developer on staff it might be easier to just get them to code this for you separate from Airtable

A mixture of the two works as well; you'd set up a table to set up all the criteria's for each institiution and use JS to compare the submissions against the criteria, and this lets you modify criteria on the fly instead of having to rely on the developer to make the changes

Doing it all without JS is also doable, and I think the setup would have 3 tables:
1. Institution criteria
2. Projects
3. Institution criteria <> Projects
  - Each record represents a link between a Institution criteria and a Project

This third table would have lookup fields to display all of the criteria fields from 'Institution criteria', allowing you to use them in the formulas.  This should let you avoid the empty columns issue you mentioned

[typeflow]

Alternatively, You can use typeflow.us for generating pdf based on Airtable data. We use Google Docs as template. We offer a lifetime plan currently at 150$. This plan lets you generate as many pdf as needed.