Following your previous video I set up an internal inventory dashboard. I add another table called requested items which allows people from our team to submit request to order some items and stock up.
So the flow is now the following:
requested items (has a form to request new item)
Purchased Items (has a form that will be filled by the owner of that specific item from our team
sold items (has a form to declare on sold items)
Moreover, I added 2 different tabs called location (who possesses an item from our team) and owner (who is the owner from our team that is in charge of ordering a specific item). Both tabs were linked to products tab.
My question is the following: I would like that whenever a form is submitted by a team member that the designated owner will be informed and will continue the process. Please let me know if that is achievable by using automation or any other tool or way.
Hi Mai! This is a great use for an Airtable automation. I’m going to describe how to do it for the “Items Sold” table, and you can duplicate for any other table. My example looks a little different than yours, but it will work the same way. The first thing you need to do is to add an “Email Address” field in the “Owner” table.
Now that you have an email address that can be associated with each Owner, go to the “Items Sold” table and create a lookup field that looks up the owner email address. This works because you’ve already linked the Owners table to the Items Sold table.
Now that you have the owner email address for each new Item Sold record that’s created, we’ll create an email automation. Go to automations and create a new automation. The trigger should be “When a form is submitted”. Then specify the form (from Items Sold) that will trigger it.
Next create a send email action. There are two: one for sending directly from Airtable and one for sending from your gmail account. I like to use the gmail one because it sends from your email address, and because it has no restrictions with the free Airtable plan. If you haven’t done this before, you’ll need to connect your gmail account. In the “to” field of the “Send Email” automation, select the owner email field. For that field, you want to use the “value”.
Thank you for walking me through this! I do have one problem. What I wanted is once someone fills in a form, it will already fill in the designated owner when the record is created. I just tested it out and this is not happening. Is there any way that it can be achieved? I associated a product to an owner on the owners tab and figured that because I have done so it will know to link any new record, let’s say a new requested item, to that specific item’s owner.
Also, for some reason, an error was created at the automation I set.
Sure, you can totally do it that way. In that case, you need to look up the email in two places:
In the “Product” table, create a lookup field called “Owner Email” that gets the owner email address, just like we did above in the “Items Sold” table
In the “Items Sold” table, change the lookup you already have to reference the “Product” table, and lookup the “Owner Email” that you just created. Now you don’t actually need “Owner” to be linked to the “Items Sold” table to get the owner email address, because it can get that info through the product.
You can see the error in red text in the bottom right. There is no email address in the “To” field, meaning that there isn’t an email address connected with that owner yet OR there’s no owner connected with that “Item Sold”. I’m guessing it’s the latter, because you said above that you don’t want to link the Owner directly to the item sold (just look them up)
