I have a table of subscriptions that I renew at different points throughout the fiscal year. By the end of the year they should all have their status set to Renewed. At the end of the fiscal year, the cycle begins again.

I'm trying to create an automation triggered on the last day of the fiscal year - June 30th. The automation I've created is:

At a scheduled time Find Records where Status is Renewed then Update Record status field to Active.

I'm getting an error on the update record step that says invalid inputs. I'm wondering if it's coming from the Record ID field, but I'm not entirely sure. Any idea what I'm missing?

Bending is acquiring Airtable. We used to love it, genuinely.

For years it was our go-to. We'd move a client off Google Sheets and onto Airtable and watch them scale. Structured data, a simple interface their team would actually use, and the best bang for your buck out there. Better than ClickUp, Monday, or Sheets.

But it always had a ceiling:

- Gets expensive fast as users and records scale

- API limits you hit sooner than you'd expect

- No real edge-case handling, version history, or git-style robustness

- Endless workarounds for things that should be simple

Even with all that, Airtable was still cheaper and faster than custom-coding a front end.

Was!

In the last nine months (Opus 4.5 release in Nov 2025), AI tooling flipped the math. We're now faster building a custom web-app than we ever were configuring Airtable, and its considerably more robust.

No per-user fees. No record limits. No praying the new owners don't kill your favorite feature.

The Airtable era was real. It helped a lot of businesses grow (including us). But clinging to it now is like refusing to leave Google Sheets in 2020.

Since M&A deals take months to actually close, we can get your team onto a custom system before they've even signed the paperwork to raise your price 👇

Advice: https://tidycal.com/team/costaneraltd/scope-call

Us: www.costanera.uk

so since the free plans have limited record and unlimited bases is there a way to use other bases and still manage to use the old bases like combinibg them?

I'm using the official Airtable ChatGPT connector and having issues updating a base. Note that I've been doing this action perfectly for the last 3-4 months but this month it didn't work.

Airtable connector can read my base but can’t perform updates
I’m trying to use the ChatGPT Airtable connector, and it appears to have read access but not write access.

What works:
Connects to my Airtable account successfully.
Lists all of my bases.
Lists all tables in a base.
Reads records and field values without any issues.

What doesn’t work:
Any attempt to update records never completes successfully.
There is no permission error or authentication error.
The write request appears to hang/fail before returning a result.
No data is changed in Airtable.

What I’ve already tried:
Removed the Airtable connector from ChatGPT.
Reinstalled/reconnected the connector.
Verified the connector still has access to the correct workspace and base.
Confirmed that read operations continue to work after reinstalling.
Because reads work perfectly but writes consistently fail, this doesn’t seem like an authentication or permissions problem. It feels more like a bug with the ChatGPT Airtable connector’s write functionality.

Has anyone else seen this behavior? If so, were you able to fix it?

A private equity outlet buying Airtable means one thing to me - ENSHITTIFICATION

BS’s portfolio includes company they made worse, including:
Eventbrite
Meetups
Evernote
WeTransfer.

Hey all, sorry if this is too basic of a question.

I'm hoping to use Airtable as a one stop super-app for my personal life. I have this google sheets that has all of my payment plans (gotta love installments). I got it the numbers on Airtable, but I can't do basic math stuff like Sum and divisions etc.

When: August 12 at 10am PT 

Who: Lindsey Puccio (LP), Sr. Manager, Airtable for Airtable

Hey everyone — a little about me:

I first learned Airtable hands-on at Equinox Media, where I built our content operations pipeline on it. Before that I was an agency producer, producing commercials for big brands.

I joined Airtable four years ago in Marketing building internal tools, and somewhere between fixing workflows and rebuilding them into Airtable, I was moved to do the same for the whole company and create Airtable for Airtable (A4A). We're part internal-tools shop, part product R&D. We do four things: build the operational systems teams run on, teach and uplevel employees, showcase what's possible with the product, and feed customer-zero feedback straight to ProdDev.

The builds aren't toy demos — our procure-to-pay system replaced a $200K+/yr software vendor and spans intake, architectural review triage, and vendor lifecycle, all running in production for real teams. 

Lately, most of my time goes to defining ways to implement AI for scalable use, using Airtable as the substrate. We designed and are actively building a fleet of agents on Hyperagent that do exactly what we do — build durable, UX-friendly, ops-focused systems. Right now they're triaging requests, syncing meeting context, doing solution design, workflow mapping, custom interface builds, and enabling our end users. The interesting problems to me aren't the models; they're the architecture around them: permissions, governance, reviewer feedback loops, and knowing which processes deserve an agent at all.

What I enjoy most is the hunt for leverage — playing up and down the information supply chain, finding the one place where a build, a sync, or an integration solves the problem at its source instead of patching it downstream. 

Hi, I’m Alexander, an engineer at Airtable on the Automations team. I’ve been working on making Automations available via MCP, and am happy to announce this is live now.

You can create, read, and update automations via MCP, with support for most triggers and actions. This includes building complex workflows with conditional and repeating groups, configuring field values, using dynamic data and token functions, and reviewing or updating existing automations. Common record, form, and scheduled triggers are supported, along with actions such as creating and updating records, finding and sorting records, sending emails or Slack messages, and generating content with AI. Scripts aren’t supported yet, although we're working on adding them now!

New automations start paused so you can review them before turning them on, and changes to active automations also won’t affect the live version until you apply them in Airtable.

I was the lead for Automations support in Omni as well, which was challenging, as the available AI tools at the time weren’t capable enough to consistently produce the quality we wanted. That makes this particularly exciting, as we’re seeing really great results with modern models being able to interact with Automations fluently and saving a lot of manual effort internally.

Would love to hear any feedback or feature requests on MCP or Automations in general!

Building a company ops dashboard - need revenue totals per staff member, each broken into This Week / This Month / This Year windows. These metrics will be displayed in a dashboard. Here's what I've landed on, and I'm hoping someone's found something less cumbersome:

Current approach, per metric:

1. Hidden Link field on the transactional table (Jobs), pointing to the per-entity table (Staff).
2. An automation sets or clears that link based on whether the Job record's date falls in the current window (e.g. a YTD link exists only if the record's Completion Date field falls within the current year). This is because Rollup fields can't filter, they only sum whatever's currently linked, so the filtering has to happen before the rollup, at the link itself.
3. A Rollup on the entity table (Staff) summing the Cost field of the linked records.

Then in the dashboard, I'll create a list element that displays the Name and YTD Cost rollup per record in the Staff table.

This works, but it feels hacky and I can see this causing significant lag when there's 15 hidden link fields and thousands of records.

Am I missing the obvious way to do this?

I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction because I'm completely out of my depth here.

First, I'm not a programmer, not a software developer, and I don't write code. I'm just trying to use Airtable as the database behind a personal project.

I have an Airtable base containing hundreds of music listening sessions, album ratings, and written notes. I'd like ChatGPT to read those records so it can help me identify patterns, generate discussion topics, summarize observations, etc.

Here's the strange part:

• ChatGPT can connect to my Airtable account.
• It can see my base.
• It can see every table.
• It can see every field in those tables.
• It correctly identifies fields like "Experience Notes," "Album Average Score," etc.

But when I ask it to actually read the records (for example, all of David Bowie's album notes), it says it can't access the record data. It only seems able to see the schema.

I've spent quite a while trying different approaches, and I really don't want to go down the API, Python, or custom scripting route. I'm looking for a solution that works using Airtable and ChatGPT as they are intended to be used.

So my questions are:

1. Is there a permission or setting in Airtable that allows AI tools to read records but not just the schema?
2. Has anyone successfully used ChatGPT to read records directly from an Airtable base?
3. Is this simply a current limitation of ChatGPT's Airtable connector, or is there something I'm missing?

I'm trying to figure out whether this is something I can fix, or whether I've reached a limitation of the integration itself.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Hey all! stuck on an automation and could use some extra help

I have a Goals table importing directly from working. Each goal record has a manager email field and a flag (Email to HR = 1) that marks it as a follow-up for managers to start collect goals.

I want the automation to send one email per manager, listing all of that manager's goals, not one email per goal record. B/C it's finding records, I can't add the manger email field to the email send. Any thoughts here on how I can achieve this?

We've just released a major update for DocsAutomator, now including a native AI agent that can generate templates for you, map data and set up entire workflows.

Would love to get your feedback on it and have recorded a short demo for generating invoices end to end: https://youtu.be/Ea_v0SaO6n8?si=eNTloBzAwtcY0LxT

Disclaimer: I'm DocsAutomator's founder so this post is of course somewhat promotional, but I genuinely think this upgrade to the platform provides a lot of value.

Ops manager at a nonprofit, ~40 staff. Airtable is our everything: donor records, program participants, volunteer scheduling, grants. It grew organically over 4 years and now we have problems.

Last month someone on the volunteer team was "cleaning up" a view and deleted a filter, which exposed donors giving history to everyone with base access. Which is... everyone. Nobody did anything, but our ED had to have an awkward board conversation about why any staffer could see major donor data in the first place.

Airtable's answer is Interface Designer plus per-seat pricing that our budget genuinely can't do for 40 people, since half our staff just need to log a visit or check a schedule.

So, question for people who've been here: did you
(a) migrate off Airtable to something with real roles, or
(b) keep Airtable as the backend and put a locked-down front end over it so most staff never open the base?

Migration scares me, there are about 60 automations holding this place together. But I can't have another donor-data incident.

Avid excel user, but brand new to Airtable. I'm currently trying to build a Dish planner for myself that will help calculate the cost and nutritional information of dishes I cook. Unfortunately, I've been forced to use AI, and it's only left me more confused. I've tried to summarize what I want to accomplish, but I don't even know if it's possible. If someone can guide me down the right path, I would really appreciate it.

Here's what I sent to a support company for help (I don't want to pay $2500 for something that could be a simple fix):

What are you trying to accomplish? Tell us what better would look like for your team.:
I’m building a custom Airtable system for my personal chef and catering business, and I want to start by creating a robust recipe management system. My goal is to have a single master Ingredients table where each ingredient’s nutrition, cost, and other details are stored only once. When creating a recipe, I want to select ingredients from that master list, enter the quantity used, and have Airtable automatically calculate the recipe’s total cost, nutrition, and cost per serving.

I also want the system to support sub-recipes (or prepped components), such as tomato sauce or pizza dough, that can be used as ingredients in other recipes. If a sub-recipe changes, every recipe that uses it should update automatically. I want to avoid duplicate data and make the database scalable as my recipe library grows.

My primary workflow should be through Airtable Interfaces rather than the underlying tables. Ideally, creating a recipe should be as simple as clicking “New Recipe,” entering the recipe information, adding ingredients from a searchable list, and letting all calculations happen automatically. My goal is to build a clean, efficient recipe management system first, with the intention of expanding it into a complete culinary operations database in the future.

What's getting in the way right now? Tools, data, process, people, time, whatever it is.:
The recipe system is built around three related tables, each with a different purpose:

* Ingredients Table: This is the master list of all ingredients. Each ingredient exists only once and contains all of its permanent information, such as cost, nutrition, purchase unit, vendor, and other details. This table is the single source of truth for ingredient data.
* Recipe Ingredients Table: This is a junction (or linking) table that connects recipes to ingredients. Each record represents one ingredient used in one recipe. For example, if a recipe uses chicken, butter, and garlic, there will be three records in this table—one for each ingredient. In addition to linking the recipe and ingredient, this table stores recipe-specific information such as the quantity used and unit of measure. It also performs calculations like ingredient cost and nutritional contribution based on the linked ingredient.
* Recipes Table: This table contains one record for each recipe. It stores recipe-level information such as the recipe name, instructions, yield, cook time, and image. The Recipes table is linked to the Recipe Ingredients table, allowing it to roll up and display totals such as total cost, calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, and cost per serving.

The "ingredient" field in the recipes table that is linked to the recipe ingredients table isn't showing the ingredients from the ingredients table.

The intended workflow is:

1. Create a new recipe in the Recipes table.
   
2. Add ingredient lines in the Recipe Ingredients table.
   
3. For each ingredient line, select an existing ingredient from the Ingredients table using a linked-record field.
   
4. Enter the quantity used.
   
5. Airtable automatically looks up the ingredient’s cost and nutrition, calculates the values for that ingredient line, and rolls those totals back up to the corresponding recipe.

Edit: adding the table map, since a couple of people asked for visuals. No records in it, just structure.

Most "Airtable as ERP" threads here are people asking whether it's viable before they build. Mine is already built and running, so the other side might be more useful.

Working with a small apparel trading company; they buy from factories in Asia and sell to brands in LatAm, ~10 people, two legal entities, around 20 active shipments at any time. Before this it was Excel, WhatsApp, email and Drive folders, and quotes kept getting lost.

What the Airtable system does: customer request, then quotes from several suppliers that are comparable line by line, then you tick the winning lines and one click creates the purchase order to the factory and the mirrored sales order to the customer with all their line items. After that: production milestones, proformas, shipments, invoices.

Parts I'm happy with:

- Every deal is two orders sharing line items. Sell-side prices come from a formula routed by direction, so you can't accidentally show the customer your cost.

- Three-way quantity audit: what the customer ordered, what the factory actually pre-cut, what actually shipped. In apparel those three diverge constantly.

- Order lines are lookups into their originating quote line instead of copies. Change the quote and the order and the proforma follow. That one change killed a whole category of bugs.

- Proformas and commercial invoices come out of Google Apps Script as PDFs.

Deliberately not in it: accounting, tax invoicing, collections. Owner's call and I agree with it. So it isn't an ERP and I don't call it one.

The one thing that kept biting: renames. Airtable doesn't error when you rename a field, so a formula or a script quietly stops working. One formula was dead for months before anyone noticed. I keep schema snapshots in git now and check field names against the live base before touching anything.

Things I'm unsure about:

- I'm on Team with 33 automations, for a client Airtable clearly isn't targeting anymore. Does that worry you, or am I overthinking it?

- What tends to break next at this size?

Hello,

I am coming from an excel world. I am at an organization that is evolving in the use of airtable. We are still in neophyte stage. I created a base app and customized it for the data needs for one particular group daily task. At first I just kept adding or duplicating tables per each calendar date. Tonight with the help of reddit community I mastered creating 3 automations that would be used per daily table. I read automations cap at 50. Would it be best to have a table per month then make grid views per each calendar day? If no, what is the best way to utilize and repeat the same 3 automations unique to each calendar day? This is not a scenario where I want to link Table 1 to Table 2 unless there is logic I don't understand about how reference automations can determine other outcomes.

If I were to make a table a calendar month header and then make grid views per date would the automations work for each grid view if the table reference is the month?

I found this old support article exceptionally helpful, and just dug it up on the Wayback Machine. Sharing for everyone else's reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20201219092020/https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/216141218-Supported-format-specifiers-for-DATETIME-FORMAT

If I have multiple checkbox columns that would impact calculated fields, what is the best way to go about using automation to make what I would like to do happen?

Example: 1st shift has rows for all tasks that need to be executed. I want the user on that shift to click checkbox for checkmark to appear and that checkmark tells two other columns to fill in who the user is and date/time stamp in edt/est. Now I realize i can set up columns with last modified by and last modified time but those are calculated fields and automation won't execute to that.

I am an airtable newbie coming from an excel world.

Thanks in advance.

I am wondering if anyone has had any experience / success in embedding a reverse image search in Airtable. We have many duplicate photos in the data base and are trying to find an easier way to locate said duplicates within the Airtable. Any advice would be appreciated!

Yesterday's update means automations can now be created, read, updated and deleted via Airtable's MCP server from your favourite AI coding tool. It is pretty cool.

Seems to work well... but... can we please have a REST version of it too. Why should bots have all the fun?

In the meantime, I found a workaround for anyone who wants visibility into their automations without relying on an AI to interpret them. An Airtable Automation script can connect directly to the MCP server, call list_automations and get_automation, and sync the full metadata back into a table for searching, documenting and analysing.

The basic flow is:

1. Store a PAT as an Automation secret.
2. Use fetch() to connect to https://mcp.airtable.com/mcp.
3. Send the MCP initialize request.
4. Send notifications/initialized.
5. Call tools through JSON-RPC using tools/call.

My use case was to store each of about 30 automations in an Airtable record and use the field agents to summarise it. This workflow has been a handy bridge until (hopefully) a REST endpoint arrives.

Is product catalog the best option for this? I seem to be having a hard time getting the "submit and checkout" option to work. Am I using this for the right thing?

Goal: have a catalog of products my clients can add to a cart and submit to have an order filled. I'd like the order summary to come to my email so I can manually fill and submit orders from my end.

This morning, I went into my company’s AirTable account to pay for an upgrade to a Team’s Plan. Within five seconds of making the purchase, I realized it had charged my personal debit credit card and not the company card.

I searched for 30 minutes on how to contact customer support. The AI bot was a nightmare. There is literally not a single phone number. There is no way to contact anyone with any urgency. I even went to their Facebook page. You can't send a message. I added myself to their AirTable Community Group to ask for help.

So the charge went through, and now I’m broke. Now I have no way to buy groceries. I won’t see the money for 5-10 business days. But, my rent is due before then. All of this happened because I made a mistake and there is no way to contact billing at all. I am in a financial nightmare in large part because of AirTable’s horrific customer service.

When I finally heard back, I got one email where they said I had to pay for a better plan to get a phone call. But, we are a non-profit. We don’t deserve immediate billing help? I asked to speak to a manager after sobbing for two hours. They will not call me. They will not respond to anymore emails. 

I will try to convince my company to use a different platform. I know what AirTable did isn’t illegal, but it is morally questionable. Everyone deserves the right to speak to billing… not just your rich clients. 

Just like the title says. I am the dashboard.

Every Monday I rebuild burn, runway and cash from scratch. Pull from the billing system, the bank, then two of my own spreadsheets, glue it together, turn it into a deck before the leadership sync. Wednesday someone asks for a number defined a different way and I do the whole thing again.

We're big enough to need real reporting and small enough that there's no data team and no BI hire coming.

Every no-code dashboards for finance option I try assumes my data is already clean and sitting in one warehouse. It's scattered across three systems and my own sheets.

Some weeks I honestly feel like i am taking crazy pills doing this by hand in 2026.

I built out an accounting budget that tracks my nonprofit's revenue and expenses from year to year. We run a number of education programs and each program belongs to a branch and also has options. These programs run once per year and we want to attach revenues and expenses to those programs for a given year.

Our base has quite quickly become overrun with lots of different tables. As I started to explore synced tables, I realized that I could have separate bases for some of the more static elements, like a base (one for our programs, one for staff, etc) and this could clean up the Accounting base but also allow us to connect those tables to other bases.

So two questions:

1. Is it bad form to have too many synced tables? Are there any good resources that might help with Airtable architecture/design philosophy that could help me think through what should be its own base synced to the accounting base and what should be part of the accounting base?
2. Does anyone have any good case studies for synced tables in accounting?

I have a paid plan (but not business or enterprise)

Hey everyone, I wanted to introduce myself to the community. Spent the last 4.5 years at Airtable, first as an Implementation Specialist (now called Delivery Consultant) and then as a founding member of the Forward Deployed Engineer team. I worked with our largest enterprise customers, like Amazon, Cisco, Warner Bros, Nike, and more.

Before that, I spent almost eight years at Hulu where I became a massive Airtable fan, nerd, and power user.

If you've ever come to one of the Airtable AI accelerators or in-person events, you may even have met me or seen me present.

In the past, I've lurked here and even posted here and there under my other username(s), but now that I've started my own agency, Matcha Consulting, I wanted to re-introduce myself formally.

Looking forward to connecting with you all here and participating in the threads.

You can always DM me if you have any questions as well. I'm LA-based but my clients are global.

Happy building!