Hi! There are a few ways I think you could accomplish this. You might want to have just one base for everything and then use fields/filters to designate which department it's in. My thoughts are -
- just use comments to @ each other, not that organized but very simple to comment at each other
- use fields to designate availability, interest, etc. you could have someone submit a form against a piece of inventory to demonstrate interest. you could set up automations so that when someone has submitted a form, it emails the person that 'owns' the item.
Overall, there are a handful of solutions that don't require any coding or any third parties! I'm sorry they weren't able to answer. I know this is an inventory tracker that isn't internal, but its structure is a good start on how you could set up your bases. https://www.airtable.com/universe/expDrHGuyjSQlrKTq/inventory-tracker
I would think you have the following tables - Inventory; Departments; Employees; Requests (only maybe, this could be the form)
Let me know if this helps or if you have any other questions!
Hi! There are a few ways I think you could accomplish this. You might want to have just one base for everything and then use fields/filters to designate which department it's in. My thoughts are -
- just use comments to @ each other, not that organized but very simple to comment at each other
- use fields to designate availability, interest, etc. you could have someone submit a form against a piece of inventory to demonstrate interest. you could set up automations so that when someone has submitted a form, it emails the person that 'owns' the item.
Overall, there are a handful of solutions that don't require any coding or any third parties! I'm sorry they weren't able to answer. I know this is an inventory tracker that isn't internal, but its structure is a good start on how you could set up your bases. https://www.airtable.com/universe/expDrHGuyjSQlrKTq/inventory-tracker
I would think you have the following tables - Inventory; Departments; Employees; Requests (only maybe, this could be the form)
Let me know if this helps or if you have any other questions!
Thanks I appreciate the feedback. It seems like the solutions that I have been finding or have been recommended do not seem to be more efficient than switching tabs and opening up an email? Unless I am understanding wrong. I was hoping to find something that would be more efficient and streamlined within the program. Maybe it just isn't built for this type of function at this point.
If you have a pro plan, I would go 1 base, 1 list of inventory with all the necessary details, a shared read only view with the inventory and a form that lets departments ask usage of another departments inventory-items, an automation to notify the "owner" of that piece and an personalised interface with 2 pages: own inventory and requests (with 2 buttons to accept or decline and some automations behind that to update the inventory list), and an automation to notify the requester.
Ofcourse (1) noting that everyone with more than read only permissions will cost you an extra user on your account, thanks to Airtable's ridiculous pricing policy, and (2) these kind of questions are difficult to answer because of the unknown wishes, current setup, ...
Hello and thank you! This does seem like a good idea, however what I have been coming around to is that it seems that it may be more time consuming to set up all the automations to make something like this work than to simply open an email and do it that way? I think maybe Airtable isn't set up for what I am looking to do and to get what I want may be more effort than it may be worth. I appreciate the input though and will certainly play around with it a bit more.
You're right that it has no use to set up systems like this just to set them up. If the setup isn't in balance with the hours saved, you could choose to do it old school 🙃