Help Needed: Creating a Dynamic Form with Personnel and Materials Tracking

[ExcelPeak]

Hello Airtable Community,

I'm currently working on setting up a Daily Job Report (DJR) table for an electrical services company and could use some guidance on creating a connected form with specific functionalities.

Our Objective: We need a form linked to the DJR table for our field staff to complete daily. This form should capture detailed job information for the day. However, the complexities arise with the following requirements:

1. Personnel Selection: Employees should be able to select up to six personnel who worked on the job. These selections need to be tracked and linked back to our original Personnel table.
2. Materials Usage Input: Employees also need to input any materials used during the job. This information should connect back to our Materials table, ideally with the ability to input quantities.

The Challenge: We are looking for a way to integrate these functionalities directly within an Airtable form. The key aspects are:

• Allowing the selection of personnel (up to 6) from a linked Personnel table.
• Enabling the input of materials used from a linked Materials table, with quantity tracking.

The only solution we currently have is creating separate fields for each potential piece of material/personnel (material field 1, material field 2, etc.), so we can accurately track the quantity of hours/material used. However, this would require the creation of many different fields (as up to 20 pieces of material can be used on one job), and the creation of formulas for each field to multiply the material used by the quantity by the price. We have explored using third-party tools for some of these functionalities (and have considered utilizing FillOut for dynamic forms) but are keen to find a solution that keeps as much as possible within the Airtable ecosystem.

Questions for the Community:

• Has anyone implemented a similar setup in Airtable and can offer insights or examples?
• Are there best practices for setting up forms with this level of complexity, particularly for tracking personnel and materials used on a job?
• Are there any recommended workarounds or integrations within Airtable that might facilitate this kind of dynamic data entry and linking?

Any advice, suggestions, or insights you can provide would be greatly appreciated. We aim to streamline our operations and enhance data accuracy and efficiency with this system.

Thank you in advance for your help and support!

Best regards,

Jaden

[ScottWorld]

As you’ve already discovered because you’ve already signed up for Fillout, unfortunately, you can’t do any of that with Airtable’s native forms. Fortunately, you can do MOST (or all) of that with Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable (and much much more). Fillout offers at least 100 advanced features that Airtable doesn’t offer in its forms.

However, it sounds like you’re looking for an all-in-one solution where you don’t need to turn to external products. Unfortunately, this is not always possible in Airtable, so you might want to explore more advanced database platforms, where you can custom build the app you want from scratch. I highly recommend FileMaker, which is one of the world’s most advanced database platforms.

I was a FileMaker developer for 30 years, and I became an Airtable consultant in 2018. If you need a referral to a FileMaker developer, please feel free to reach out to me through my website.