What's the best solution for organizing a Weekly Status in Airtable

[Kristof_Vandenb]

We need to plan and follow up our teams on a weekly basis.
Or we do it with start-end dates (but then we need multiple lines for the same person) Or we create a column for every week (see screenshot). Not the best database-design, but it works for now.
also for creating totals… it’s quite challenging (W01+W02+…W52)

Are there better solutions to tackle this ?

[Databaser]

Hi @Kristof_Vandenbogaer and welcome to the community!

You could add a single date field (manually filled or eg a “created time” field) to every record and create a formula field that gives you the week number. You can then group by that field.

Use:

WEEKNUM(date)

[Kristof_Vandenb]

At this moment I have 52 (week)columns where we can give the percentage planned of the employee.
Alternative is that we use a new record for every project/employee/task with a start-end date, but this gives us not the visibility and the flexibility to do a planning on a weekly base.
. This is a far better database model, but it has not the same user interface flexibility. People are used to fill in an Excel, and fill the % in every week. Very effective, but less OK Database structure…

The disadvantage of our method is that we can’t create a timeline/gant/chart or other “easy” reporting tools.

[Databaser]

Kristof_Vandenbogaer:

This is a far better database model, but it has not the same user interface flexibility.

Choosing is losing, but I would use a database tool as a database, and not a wannabe Excel for UX reasons. Personal thought of course :slightly_smiling_face:

[Kristof_Vandenb]

I agree…
But you don’t want to manage 250 people with 20 managers who will need to fill in a new record for every week of every task… just not manageable
(but that’s a scaling problem. Tbh the way we have implemented it now works very fluent, but we need some extra backend-workarounds to get our reporting and I was wondering if there were better setups)

[Databaser]

Automations could help creating recurring tasks. Maybe that could be something to explore?