Managing payments for Classes-Guides on an individual basis

[Lior_Talmor]

Hi all,
I’m having trouble with what I’d thought would be simple enough, regarding the structure of my base/tables…
I’m managing Courses comprised of multiple Classes which can include multiple Guides each, so I have a “courses” table linked to a “Classes” table (multiple classes within a course)
and a “Guides” table linked to the classes table, where each class can have multiple Guides simultaneously.
I’d like to manage the payments for the guides on an individual basis, so that I can for instance see all the payments for a guide and mark each one with a “paid/due” checkbox.
The problem:
All of the classes are within the same record inside the ‘Guides’ base, so I can only set them all as ‘paid’ or ‘due’, not individually.
Same problem within the classes base - all the guides for a particular class are within the same record inside the classes base, so I cannot mark payments for guides on an individual basis, I can only mark the class as paid (for all the applicable guides).

my conclusion is that I would need a table that will populate itself whenever I assign a guide to a class, giving me a 1-to-1 relationship between classes and guides, each one on its own record which I can then mark as ‘paid’, BUT firstly, that’s a whole lot of duplicates and secondly, how would I go about doing that? Probably some kind of automation is needed, or maybe I’m just thinking about it all wrong?
Thanks for reading and much appreciation in advance for any help from the dearest Airtable community :slightly_smiling_face:

[Lior_Talmor]

Anyone? Anything? :slightly_smiling_face:

[Kamille_Parks]

Questions:

1. Are Guides the only thing that are paid for, or do Courses and Classes each require payments?
2. Does a single Guide only belong to one Class, or can a Guide be associated with multiple Classes?
3. Are you keeping track of who is buying these Guides and attending these Classes/Courses?

[Lior_Talmor]

Kamille_Parks:

1. Are you keeping track of who is buying these Guides and attending these Classes/Courses?

First of all, Guides = Teachers, just to be clear.
We provide courses, and we pay our guides (teachers!) for each class that they teach within our courses. So a course is comprised of 8 classes (8 meetings) and a single class can have different groups within it, each taught by a different Guide/Teacher.
To your questions:

1. participants pay for the course, they register for an 8-classes course. We keep track on the registrants as well as charge them etc.
2. A guide can most definitely be associated with multiple classes, both within a single course and other courses. A class has multiple guides teaching different groups simultaneously at the same time.
3. Yes, I’ve got the participant list. Each participant is registered to the whole course and assigned to his designated group/guide.

I want to pay the Guides for each class within each course, in accordance with whatever invoice they’ve issued to me. But as stated above >> I can only mark a class as “paid” which will be applicable to all of the guides OR I can only mark the guide as “paid” which will be applicable to all of the classes, since Guides & Classes are linked fields, and I need a 1-to-1 relationship so I can mark 1 class of 1 guide as PAID.

Any ideas?

[Kamille_Parks]

Thank you for the clarificatiosn. I believe you’ll need an additional table (i.e. [Payments]) to track individual payments made to a guide for each course they’ve taught.

The [Payments] table will have a field linking to [Classes] and another field linking to [Guides]. It will also have a field to mark payment (probably either a timestamp or checkbox).

You should then be able to use a combination of rollup/lookup/count fields in [Guides] to see if all of a Guide’s classes have been paid for.

[Lior_Talmor]

Wow… This solution is actually SO simple it didn’t even cross my mind… Thanks so much!!
I actually ended up replicating those classes, not allowing multiple records on the linked “Guides” field and finally achieved this 1-to-1 relationship I was after. Yes, it was probably very ‘Excelish’ of me and there must be a better solution but going with the new [payment] solution would have required me to go with some advanced automation, since I had to get this table automatically populate the records with every Guide added to every Class, and then of course take care of deleting each record if I ever remove a guide or update a record if I happen to reassign a guide… Anyway, my final tip here: KISS, as always (Keep it Simple Stupid), at least during the learning curve until we get to unleash those Airtable superpowers !! Thank Kamille and kudo’s for the help and for your website which looks fabulous :slightly_smiling_face:

Cheers,