As we’ve been testing AirTable for our business’s project management needs, one thing we’ve had trouble setting up is something like an expense report, purchase order, or mileage report.
Our typical reports would be a single printable document with several standard pieces of data (job name/number, purchase date, vendor info, billing method, etc), and a table containing purchase info (item, qty, price) with totals at the bottom.
In Airtable, you can currently accomplish something like this with two tables (let’s call them “Expense Reports” and “Expense Items”) with the latter connected to the former with a “Link” field. But it’s a bit clumsy, because you’d have one table with each “report” and another table that contains lots and lots and lots of expense items that likely have nothing to do with each other. More importantly, it’s not really possible to export the data from each Report while including the Expense Item data.
A more elegant solution would be a field type called “Nested Table.” This would create (within a record) a small table/spreadsheet with customizable columns, simple math functions, and the ability to add rows on-the-fly.
Thoughts?
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