QR Code for „away“ and „in stock“

[Sebastian_Winte]

Hi. I am new at airtable. I rent camera equipment and would like to stick an QR code on every piece of equipment.

Is there a possibility to scan each piece with the QR code when renting the equipment and Airtable picks it up in a seperate list (rent to) and when it comes back it is scanned again and set back to “in stock” ?

Thanks for help.

[ScottWorld]

MiniExtensions has built a lot of QR Code functionality at:
https://miniextensions.com/category/barcode-qr-code/

[JonathanBowen]

@Sebastian_Winter - you could do something like this:

So, your product or equipment table has the barcode/QR as the primary field and in the “Scans” table you scan the item in and out (in the Barcode field of the Scans table). You need to link the scan record to the product record in a separate field as you can’t read a barcode directly into a linked field (more on this below).

Now, back in the Products table, you can count the number of scans. If there is an even number of scans it should be in stock. If there’s a odd number of scans it will be out of stock. Total number of scans is a count field. Status is a formula:

IF(MOD({Total number of scans}, 2) = 1, 'Away', 'In Stock')

As you scan items into the Scans table and make the link to the products table, the status will automatically update based on the number of linked scans.

Linking the two tables: This is the only downside of this solution - you need to make the link between the two tables. A few ways you could do this:

• Once the item has been scanned, just copy and paste the barcode value into the linked field. Easy to do this in the web app and can even be done without too much hassle in the mobile app, so could even be done at time of scanning.
• Use the scripting block to run a script that links the tables (needs to be manually run at the moment)
• Use a 3rd party tool like Zapier to automate linking the tables. This could run on a timer every day, hour, part hour

---

If this answers your question, please consider marking this as the "solution". If not, please post again for more help. Thanks!

[JonathanBowen]

Of course, this is just a simple skeleton solution for the problem. The scans could be linked to customers/individuals and contain other data - who, when due back, cost etc, etc.

[Sebastian_Winte]

Can you solve this differently via Airtable?

Maybe I will give an example of my project.

I have provided all the camera equipment with QR codes and sorted them in a list (in stock). Now I´d like to pack equipment for rental. I would also like to scan the items that are rented.

I´d like to scan 20 or more articles in succession and then count them as “selected” to assign them to a new table “rented”? It doesn’t make sense to me if I have to change the status after each article. I would assign a new name to this table and the articles would be marked as “rented” in the inventory list.