Temporary access for data entry purposes

Hello and welcome @James_Doughty!

There are a couple of possible workflows that could match your needs depending on what would be easiest for you. One of the simpler workflows would be to create an Airtable form for the Data entry team to fill out to populate all the needed fields. By using a form the Data entry team would never see any data from the table.

I would also recommend looking through the Permissions support article as well if you’d like to give the Data entry team a certain level of access that you could remove whenever needed.

One of the coolest workflows I could see would be to setup a Sync base that would automatically sync from the Data entry team’s base to a separate base.

Let me know if any of that helps-- or what you end up going with!

@James_Doughty Welcome to the Airtable community! I concur with the previous recommendations to look into synced bases. Permissions probably do not have granular enough control for your situation, as you cannot allow edit access to some records but not others in the same table. Depending on the structure of the data, and your workflows, you could also have the contractors enter the data into a spreadsheet, and then you import the data into Airtable.

Do you want to remove the data from their view/control to declutter what the contractors see, to prevent your data from being changed, or to prevent the contractors from making copies of the data? If you just want to declutter what the contractors see, you might want to look into using views. If you are worried about data changes, synced tables and possibly automations might be the way to go, but this can get complex If you are worried about contractors making copies of the data, keep in mind that any collaborator on a base (even read-only collaborators) can instantly make a copy of all the data in the base without your knowledge.

@Rose_K Thank you for joining the Airtable community. It’s great to see the presence of Airtable staff on these forums, especially helping out some of the newer users with questions. A few other Airtable staff members have made one or two posts and then disappeared. I’ve enjoyed the tone and content of your posts, and I hope that you stick around and continue to share your knowledge and experience!