Linked Records not filling down

[sehenley]

Hi 

The screen shot is of a table for sales in one of my bases. 

The 'pay window filter' field determines which pay month the date falls in, our pay windows run 25th to 24th, so 26th September would fall in Oct Pay Month. 

The 'Pay Month' Field formats that date into the correct Text format I want which then links to a second table called Pay Months where the record name is October 2023, November 2023 etc. 

As you can see from the screen shot, I've filled in a new record with a date, its automatically calculated the Pay window filter, but 'pay month' has automatically formatted the text and linked to the other table. Why is this, am i missing something? I thought this would automatically do that. 

I'm new to airtable just building out systems for my business, so any help much appreciated. 

[Jack_Manuel · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Linked records have to be selected, they won't automatically link based on formulas alone. There's a few ways to achieve what you're after; the easiest would probably be an automation that runs when a new sales record is created. And the easiest way to do this would be to change your 'Pay Window Filter' field to display the same format as the primary field of 'Pay Month'. Then you could have the automation find a record in the 'Pay Month' table where the primary field matches the 'Pay Window Filter' field of the new sales record and add it to the 'Pay Month' field of the sales record.

If you don't want to change the format of the 'Pay Window Filter', you could add a matching 'Pay Window Filter' field to the 'Pay Month' table and match based on that.

[sehenley]

Jack, thanks thats exactly what I've done and its working great.