5/27/2025 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S22-E08

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The BuiltOnAir Podcast is Sponsored by On2Air – Integrations and App extensions to run your business operations in Airtable.

In This Episode

Welcome to the BuiltOnAir Podcast, the live show.  The BuiltOnAir Podcast is a live weekly show highlighting everything happening in the Airtable world.

Check us out at BuiltOnAir.com. Join our community, join our Slack Channel, and meet your fellow Airtable fans.

Alli Alosa – Hi there! I’m Alli 🙂 I’m a fine artist turned “techie” with a passion for organization and automation. I’m also proud to be a Community Leader in the Airtable forum, and a co-host of the BuiltOnAir podcast. My favorite part about being an Airtable consultant and developer is that I get to talk with people from all sorts of industries, and each project is an opportunity to learn how a business works.

Kamille Parks – I am an Airtable Community Forums Leader and the developer behind the custom Airtable app “Scheduler”, one of the winning projects in the Airtable Custom Blocks Contest now widely available on the Marketplace. I focus on building simple scripts, automations, and custom apps for Airtable that streamline data entry and everyday workflows.

Dan Fellars – I am the Founder of Openside, On2Air, and BuiltOnAir. I love automation and software. When not coding the next feature of On2Air, I love spending time with my wife and kids and golfing.

Show Segments

Round The Bases – 00:01:40 –

Meet the Creators – 00:01:41 –

Meet Kurt Schnakenberg from adbm.agency.

Lifelong entrepreneur, hooked on Airtable’s ability to bring technical solutions surpassing my coding abilities. President-Elect of Entrepreneur’s Organization Chicago Chapter, Past President of Chicago Brass Inc. and Founder of adbm.agency.

Base Showcase – 00:01:41 –

We dive into a full working base that will Kurt will share the means by which he created a customized ERP, transitioning from out of the box. Major unlock for his companies to be able to customize and not follow an enterprise software platform's established ones.

Feature Alert – 00:01:42 –

We dive into Same Table Backlinks feature –
This LOONG awaited feature is finally here. Kamille will walk us through how the new feature works.

Full Segment Details

Segment: Round The Bases

Start Time: 00:01:40

Roundup of what’s happening in the Airtable communities – Airtable, BuiltOnAir, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Segment: Meet the Creators

Start Time: 00:01:41

Kurt Schnakenberg –

Meet Kurt Schnakenberg from adbm.agency.

Lifelong entrepreneur, hooked on Airtable’s ability to bring technical solutions surpassing my coding abilities. President-Elect of Entrepreneur’s Organization Chicago Chapter, Past President of Chicago Brass Inc. and Founder of adbm.agency.

Segment: Base Showcase

Start Time: 00:01:41

Customized ERP

We dive into a full working base that will Kurt will share the means by which he created a customized ERP, transitioning from out of the box. Major unlock for his companies to be able to customize and not follow an enterprise software platform's established ones.

Segment: Feature Alert

Start Time: 00:01:42

Airtable Feature – Same Table Backlinks

We dive into Same Table Backlinks feature –
This LOONG awaited feature is finally here. Kamille will walk us through how the new feature works.

Full Transcription

The full transcription for the show can be found here:

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to the Built On Air Podcast, the variety show for all things Airtable. In each episode, we cover four different segments. It's always fresh and different, and lots of. Fun while you get the insider info on all things Airtable. Our hosts and guests are some of the most senior experts in the Airtable community.

[00:00:26] Join us live each week on our YouTube channel every Tuesday at 11:00 AM [00:00:30] Eastern and join our active [email protected]. Before we begin a word from our sponsor onto air backups onto OnAir backups. Provides automated Airtable backups to your cloud storage for secure and reliable data protection, prevent data loss, and set up a secure Airtable backup system with.

[00:00:47] Onto air [email protected]. As one customer Sarah said, having automated Airtable backups has freed up hours of my time every other week, and the fear of losing anything longtime [00:01:00] customer, David states on-air backups might be the most critical piece of the puzzle to guard against unforeseeable disaster.

[00:01:06] It's easy to set up and it just works. Join Sarah, David, and hundreds more Airtable users like you to protect your Airtable data with OnAir backups. Sign up today with promo code built on air for a 10% discount. Check them [email protected]. And now let's check out today's episode and see what we built on air.[00:01:30] 

[00:01:36] Dan Fellars: Welcome into episode eight of Season 22, last episode of the season. Good to have you back. Got myself, Ali and Camille here with us, and we're joined by Kurt. Tell us your last name. How do you pronounce it? 

[00:01:51] Kurt: Bergen. 

[00:01:52] Dan Fellars: Very cool. Last name. Awesome. Good to have you with us. We'll learn more about Kurt and his story later on in the show.[00:02:00] 

[00:02:00] I'll walk us through what we're gonna be talking about today. We'll start with our round the bases. Everything new and updates going on in the Airtable world and all the communities keep you up to date and fresh. Then we'll, we'll spotlight onto where our primary sponsor. Then we will learn about Kurt and his story and background and how he came into this world of Airtable.

[00:02:24] And then Kurt's gonna walk us through a base that he's built and the functionality for a [00:02:30] customized ERP solution. And then just a quick shout out on how to join our community if you're not already a part of it. And then finally, Camille's gonna walk us through finally, the new feature of Same Table Backlinks, which we'll talk about here.

[00:02:45] So with that around the bases, first I'll start with start at the top with Howie. So we mentioned this a couple weeks ago, how we started a new podcast, how he is the CEO of [00:03:00] Airtable and started a new podcast called Builders and Breakthroughs. I. Has a new episode out speaking with a VP at Walmart and talking about how Walmart uses Airtable and AI to transform their business.

[00:03:16] So new episode, if you want to get into the mind of Howie and people that he's talking to. Check that out. Okay. On the, what's new? There was nothing new [00:03:30] but. So they didn't announce anything new, but the community at Built on Air is on top of it. And I think Rob was first credited. Ben was the one that posted it on his behalf.

[00:03:43] But reciprocal linking, which we're gonna showcase later in the show, is finally out. So this is kind of a bombshell, kind of a big deal. So we won't, we won't spoil the lead. Camille's gonna walk us through how this works. So you gotta stick around for the show. [00:04:00] And this is very cool. Something we've been waiting for for a while.

[00:04:04] Okay. Here's a question. What okay, so Luis on LinkedIn is begging Airtable to add this one feature. It's funny, everybody has like, their, their pet feature that they're just dying for to add. So this one is, automatically populating a linked record field, like a default or from a lookup. So being able to do a lookup and then auto-populating.

[00:04:29] [00:04:30] My question is, is I guess if you have a double layered lookup, you could get a lookup, but if you have a lookup, then it has to be from a linked, an existing linked record. So I'm not exactly sure how this would work. He has a screenshot of how he would think it would work, populate from a lookup, and then I guess you'd specify the lookup field.

[00:04:54] Alli Alosa: Yeah, I, I mean, I could see it being useful populating from like a formula or [00:05:00] like something, I mean. Yeah, I would like more, like Coda for example, does this, where you can write a formula and have that formula return, like linked records essentially. Which is super powerful and I've found that to be really useful in a lot of cases.

[00:05:20] So I could see some use for this for sure.

[00:05:28] Kamille Parks: I am a little [00:05:30] confused. I'm sure if I were to be walked through it, like through how a base is set up, I'd get it. I do wanna highlight the, the phrasing of this post is hilarious. At the bottom it says, tagging Airtable with the usual combination of love and despair. 

[00:05:50] Dan Fellars: We've all been there before, 

[00:05:52] Kamille Parks: and for that alone, I support this request.

[00:05:55] Yeah, 

[00:05:57] Dan Fellars: I will say, I, I think you can. So they're [00:06:00] saying how, how you currently do it is, you know, you basically have a lookup of the, of a record id and then you, he's saying you need two automations. I think you could do it with one automation. 

[00:06:12] You could. 

[00:06:13] Dan Fellars: Yeah. That if you're just looking for an update on.

[00:06:18] On that field? The lookup field, I think you could do it either way. 

[00:06:23] Alli Alosa: I usually just do a formula field that's like, if this record ID does not equal this field, then I need to [00:06:30] update and that just returns a value. And my, my automation is when this field is not empty. 

[00:06:34] Mm-hmm. 

[00:06:35] Alli Alosa: And that works for creation and update all the time.

[00:06:39] Yeah. However it can get stuck. I can get into the weeds there, but sometimes I have a second automation that runs on a cr, like a Aron job that's like every night fixing anything got stuck, but 

[00:06:51] mm-hmm. 

[00:06:52] Kamille Parks: There's one of the open source alternatives to Airtable table has their own [00:07:00] automation layer and they have an automation action for on create or update.

[00:07:06] Which Airtable does not have at this present moment in time. They should have one so people don't have to do hacks and works around like this, but you know. Yeah. 

[00:07:20] Dan Fellars: Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. Some interesting commentary on there. Next one also from LinkedIn. So somebody pointed this out. I don't know that [00:07:30] I've noticed this.

[00:07:31] So there's a new tab here, lemme bring up this. So create AI fields and it brings up kind of this like tutorial and gives you examples of prompts that you could use to create fields or even this might be, even be like shortcuts to, to automatically do it. So if you're looking for inspiration on how to, what types of fields that you could [00:08:00] add, what types of AI fields they're really trying to help make it as easy as possible to add AI into your base.

[00:08:09] So there's that. Okay, next one. Also a similar feature. This was just on air table's main page. We've talked about this in the past, but it's kind of cool reminder. One thing I noticed in here watching this video, lemme go [00:08:30] back.

[00:08:30] If you just saw that drag right there, that's something, I don't think we've shown it, but I think we've talked about. You can now drag from your file explorer directly in there and it'll automatically paste all of 'em. Mm-hmm. Lemme show that again. So it just drags it and it creates one record for each individual item which is sometimes what you want.

[00:08:54] Sometimes you want want to drag it. Right into an attachment field, which I think you can [00:09:00] do if you just drag it into a specific attachment field. Mm-hmm. And then anyways, this is showing the ai extracting directly out of, out of the PDFs, the information that you're looking for. So that's a cool feature of of ai.

[00:09:16] Alli Alosa: I love that it shows you that the source too, like it actually cites where it got that information from, which makes it so much less black boxy. And I'm, I'm really into that. I think that's awesome. That's nice. 

[00:09:28] Dan Fellars: Let's see. Do you have to have a [00:09:30] field 

[00:09:31] Alli Alosa: when you click on, when they click on one of those or expand it, it shows where it came from.

[00:09:37] Mm-hmm. 

[00:09:38] Alli Alosa: And then they, like it was, I think in the middle somewhere. 

[00:09:43] Kamille Parks: The A before, I think before this AI fields I believe can search the internet now. So I imagine it would tell you the address if it got it from the web. 

[00:09:55] It does. It's very cool. 

[00:09:57] Dan Fellars: Yeah, [00:10:00] it was just right there. It has a dropdown for sources right there.

[00:10:08] Yeah. Very cool. That is helpful. Okay, next one. This comes from the built on air community. This is one it's just a reminder. I think this has been around for a while, but Ben Bailey, who's been on the show before just noticed it and it's one of those things where it's like, whoa, how long has this been in there?

[00:10:29] [00:10:30] But, let's see. How do you explain this? Can you explain this? What, what he's finding? 

[00:10:33] Yeah, it's, there's 

[00:10:34] Alli Alosa: a, 

[00:10:35] a, 

[00:10:35] Alli Alosa: in the interface, if you have a linked record field and you're trying to display it, I'm guessing this is right, you can display a linked record field as a field or a view. And when you do as a view, it can, it gives you all the same configuration options as like, you know, a list.

[00:10:56] Layout does, or you can change the visualization to [00:11:00] calendar list, CanBan, whatever it might be. This also works with lookup fields of linked records, and it's been that way since I think day one of interfaces, and that's one of my favorite things about the interfaces, is that you don't need to have it be a direct linked record to display it as such.

[00:11:18] One thing it does prevent you from doing though, is you can't add records through a form. I believe if it's a lookup field. I believe that's one of the 

[00:11:28] limitations. 

[00:11:29] Kamille Parks: [00:11:30] Yes. Which I find upsetting, but they are, they, you can make them editable in line editable, so you can edit specific fields of whatever's displayed on it, but you can't create new records from it.

[00:11:44] Even if the form that you have pop up doesn't require that whatever field is linking. Those tables together be empty. It just won't let you do it. So you have to find some other means of getting a new [00:12:00] record available through that relationship. But it is pretty, pretty useful. 

[00:12:06] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Is there a limit to how many layers deep?

[00:12:10] The linked record? 

[00:12:12] Kamille Parks: Not that I know of. I haven't hit it, although I have, I don't think I've tried it with more than. Like two degrees of separation between tables, but you know, I don't, I don't know what in there would stop it from being able to do it. Your filter conditions might end up being really weird and [00:12:30] unhelpful if they're so many tables away, but it, I guess it depends on your schema.

[00:12:35] Yeah. 

[00:12:35] Dan Fellars: Yeah, that'd be interesting to test. Interesting. Yeah. So you see here, so, so it's a lookup field of a linked record is the lookup field. So it's two layers deep here and it's being treated. So yeah, that's a cool, cool feature to, to include. All right, next one. Okay, now we're getting into [00:13:00] the AI world.

[00:13:01] So Joe asked a question of. You know, is Airtable going to, so we've talked about MCP in the past stands for Model context protocol. And it's basically like an AI wrapper around, around the API. So there are community. Based MMCP servers for Airtable, but Airtable itself does not have one. So Joe's kind of asking if they're going to provide [00:13:30] their own so that people kind of standardize around the one that's managed by Airtable or just use community ones.

[00:13:38] Or like other companies like Pipedream has written their own that you could use. So interesting conversation there. Bill French chimes in. And so yeah, if you are into kind of that next wave of usage, that's an interesting conversation going [00:14:00] on. We're gonna stay with the MCP realm. So open AI last week announced a.

[00:14:08] Basically embedded MCP support for their chat and their API and Zapier is like one of their. Maine. So it's interesting, Zapier's really embraced this approach, this agent communication. And so this, this demo showcases in the chat inside of [00:14:30] Open a P OpenAI or chat GPT. You can, you can ask it to actually perform tasks and it does that through Zapier.

[00:14:39] And so does that mean, do you have to have like. Have that zap all set up for it to use it, or will it like essentially create the zap on the fly? I don't know how that works. Yeah, I haven't played with anything in this realm yet. Yeah. [00:15:00] Yeah. So anyway, so anything that you have, you have to at least have like the connections to the different tools configured in Zapier for it to use.

[00:15:10] I don't know if you actually have to set up the Zap. Beforehand for it to be used, that'd probably be my guess. I doubt it would just, I don't know my with agents. So anyways, some cool stuff there. 

[00:15:25] Super cool. 

[00:15:27] Dan Fellars: Okay. More [00:15:30] stuff. Also in kind of if you're getting into this. Agent realm of automating tools.

[00:15:36] This tool Auki, one of the challenges with Airtable and with a lot of other tools is managing the connection to Airtable. So Airtable uses OAuth. And one of the, if you've implemented auth before, one of the challenges is keeping your tokens refreshed. You have to continually keep 'em up to date and, and pinging, [00:16:00] and if you don't, then they, they'll expire and you gotta reconnect and it's kind of a pain.

[00:16:05] I've been through that battle, so this hot kit is kind of making that easier. They'll. They'll handle all the refreshing of the tokens so you don't have to worry about it. So if you're doing agent work communicating with Airtable, Airtable is one of the ones that they support on their initial release.

[00:16:23] So that's interesting. 

[00:16:27] Yep. 

[00:16:28] Dan Fellars: Okay. And it's by [00:16:30] this company, PIKA os, which does other stuff, if you're a developer, has started looking at them. Okay. Two more. Here's a couple tools third party tools that if you wanna check out. I always like to highlight new tools that support Airtable. So Martin has released an Airtable to Stripe invoice sync.

[00:16:51] So if you're using Airtable and Stripe and you wanna keep them in sync you can check now that power sync 

[00:16:59] [00:17:00] and. 

[00:17:01] Dan Fellars: There's one and then there's one more table proxy. So if if you're using the API, so if you're doing a lot of this AI stuff there are limits to air table's API and so this tool is going to be a proxy that basically caches the data that you're querying so that it's not continually hitting the API.

[00:17:25] So it allows you to. Maybe query more, more quickly [00:17:30] or more data and it'll cache where it can. So that might be helpful to, to get around the Airtable limitations around their API. There's a tool to check out. It looks like it's not live yet, but you can follow this thread to, to stay up to date when that goes live.

[00:17:51] All right. So yeah, there is definitely one big piece of news. We're gonna talk about it later, but very excited for that that we'll get into later in the show. [00:18:00] So with that, if you are running your business on Airtable, it's best practice to make sure your data is stored outside of Airtable, and that's where Ware comes in, our backup solution.

[00:18:11] Helps you store your data, your schema, your attachment information, all in your existing infrastructure at Box Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive. So check it out onto air.com. You can use promo code built on air for a discount and start backing up [00:18:30] your data today. That tool. Okay. With that, Kurt Sch, tell us a little bit about yourself.

[00:18:39] I'm gonna put you. On the spotlight here, switch you up. So tell us a little bit about your story, your history, your background context, and then how you found Airtable and, and what you're up to. 

[00:18:53] Kurt: Sweet. Yeah. It's all about me now I get my five minutes. Appreciate it. So I historically ran a [00:19:00] building mis.

[00:19:00] Materials distribution company that was heavily schedulized project product. So think we are in door hardware. So let's say you're, you're building a Highend residence. We had to specify often dozens of items per specific door. And these are not commodity items. These, they're generally made to order, if not designed and engineered to order as well.

[00:19:22] So it's this high level of complexity and we had spent decades working through the various [00:19:30] out of the box ER ps. So we were on an Epicor product for a while. We were on dynamics 365 R two oh. So we we're running on all these products and the. We were told one of two things when we would come in and say, Hey, our, our, our workflow is unique.

[00:19:45] The way we do things is different. We were either told, no it's not. Every business has all these commonalities and our ERP solves all of 'em. Right? And then when they, or if they sniff that maybe they thought we had enough [00:20:00] money, they were like, you're right. It is unique and let's, you know, customize this for you solely.

[00:20:05] Right. So we were, we were sitting in this spot where we had no great solution, right? Live with antiquated, unintentional workflows or, you know, sell one of my kidneys to try and to try and finance building out something that actually worked for us. And so we were running on the Dynamics platform, and again, we had sunk a ton into [00:20:30] customizing.

[00:20:30] It wasn't giving us what we were looking for. And I randomly ran into somebody in a community like entrepreneurs Organization. And if you guys have heard of it, like EO is YPO, Vistage, these different groups. So I was actually interviewing a new prospect for the Chicago Chapter VO and we ended up jamming on I on Airtable for.

[00:20:52] Two hours. You know, it totally shifted the interview. All we talked about was Airtable. I'm like, oh shoot, I gotta actually figure out about your business. But I [00:21:00] was hooked. And then about 60 days later, we had our CRM rebuilt in Airtable. And then over the last roughly two years, we've just been adding other functionalities to it.

[00:21:11] That's awesome. Very cool. And I, I think my wife will eventually leave me because of Airtable. 

[00:21:17] I can relate to that. I enjoy my whole family talking about it so much. 

[00:21:22] Kurt: When I, when I tried running our family on Airtable, I'm like, great honey. We're gonna have meetings and we're gonna set our goals and we're gonna magic it in Airtable.

[00:21:29] [00:21:30] She just, she gave up.

[00:21:34] Dan Fellars: There can be limits to your Airtable. 

[00:21:37] Kurt: Yeah. It's gotta end somewhere. Right. You know, I'm a, a non-tech founder and I've moved on, I have another business now, but I'm, I'm a non-tech person and this Airtable Bridge the gap for me being able to understand it and implement as my team needed. Right. Like some of the custom implementations we had tried prior.

[00:21:57] Failed and, and they kept failing over and over again. [00:22:00] And eventually we had to look in the mirror and say, it's us, not the subs that we were hiring to do it. And we realized, well, we didn't even know the right questions to ask. We, we were just so uneducated that we needed to sort of stumble in the dark for a little bit and Airtable allowed us to stumble in the dark enough to figure our way out.

[00:22:21] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Very cool. 

[00:22:22] Super exciting. 

[00:22:23] Dan Fellars: What have been. Some of your favorite features or you know, [00:22:30] obstacles that you've been able to overcome? 

[00:22:32] Kurt: So for a while, the before we were running on two-way sync. That was quite the headache for us. And the biggest obstacles, we've gone back and rebuilt just about everything that we put in place because at the onset, again, we were, we were stumbling in the dark and it was a disaster.

[00:22:46] So we realized architecture was terrible and circled back. To almost a complete redo, but the, the biggest benefit that we've, that we love, right, is, is the adoption from our team. Because someone will come and [00:23:00] say, Hey, I, I'd like to change this, you know, small aspect, and we change it on the fly, right?

[00:23:04] We're not, we're not putting together an RFQ to our developer who then comes back to us with a proposal. We negotiate, sign off on it. We have to test it. It's not, you know, a month to get these changes in place. It's. It's quick on the fly, and so the adoption level from the team has been much higher than any other software we've implemented prior.

[00:23:25] Yeah. Very cool. They're also starting to dig a little more than they should, I think, becomes a problem. Right? They [00:23:30] start realizing what they can do with it and trying to do it themselves at times. So we're, we're working on limiting that. Yeah. 

[00:23:37] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Any wishlist items? Anything you wish Airtable would add?

[00:23:45] Kurt: I. That's a great question. I don't know that I'm deep enough to have a strong answer for that. We've gone in it and we've found a lot of the issues for us. I wish there was a means without doing two automations [00:24:00] to have like a reverse trigger on the automation. So we have a lot of dynamic data that if we trigger an automation, we're then building another automation to undo it if it goes the other direction.

[00:24:13] And so we, we played around with views and different approaches to it, but if there was an intrinsic way to, to have it where it was reciprocal, that would be helpful. 

[00:24:23] Dan Fellars: Interesting. Yeah. That could be helpful. Very cool. Well, we're excited to have you [00:24:30] share Oh, and 

[00:24:30] Kurt: report and, and an internal PDF generator beyond page designer, and that, that, you know, I highly doubt I'm the only one who's ever mentioned that, but the number of, would you believe 

[00:24:41] Kamille Parks: you're the first one?

[00:24:42] Oh, really?

[00:24:46] Kurt: Oh man. The number of issues we run into between, you know, all of our getting old, we use pdf.co and just the, the issues of tying stuff over, is it, it's, it's probably three quarters of the bugs we encounter. [00:25:00] 

[00:25:00] Dan Fellars: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. That's a common use case and the limitations of their page designer and yeah, definitely.

[00:25:11] All right, we're gonna move on. We're gonna show. Here. So you're gonna walk us through the CRP system that you're talking about? Yeah. What you got. Lemme put your screen on for sure. Yeah, now we can see it. 

[00:25:27] Kurt: All right, so this is the crux of our, our business [00:25:30] functionality. So we. In this section in here. So we, we create tags in this specific project.

[00:25:36] We create a tag because this company does door hardware. It's door hardware, but it could be, let's just, we'll, we'll talk bathrooms or plumbing products. 'cause that's probably simpler to understand. So if you have in a house, four different bathrooms. Each one is going to have a set of different products.

[00:25:51] You're gonna have a different toilet, different tub, different faucet, different sink, all these things that go into it. They all have different pricing, they have different preps, meaning that the, the general [00:26:00] contractor, the plumber needs to prepare for them differently. They have lots of different attributes that tie into them that, and, and we have to be able to check to say, do these actually work together?

[00:26:08] You're gonna have different colors, different situations, and so we create tags. We then enter in all the information from floor plans that are relevant to that tag and then we start assigning it items, right? So this is the tag at the top part, and then down here we get into all the items. We control the pricing.

[00:26:25] So vendor, different vendors have you know, they might have a price increase [00:26:30] or with the tariffs we've been seeing recently, our pricing is fluctuating almost daily. And so we need to be able to manage correct pricing with our clients. And so we're able to manage that within here. We can enter in different pricing our.

[00:26:42] Sort of our MSRP, our unit price costs, our gross profit percentage, what we're selling it at. Then we get into lead time, so how long it takes to get, and then we have specs and prep. So these would be PDFs that we have synced into a WordPress website [00:27:00] where we can go in and view line drawings or instructions on how to essentially drill and set up for that piece.

[00:27:07] So one is like line drawings, the other, the other is like essentially installation instruction. We're then able to go through and order them in different subsets. So you might say, I want to order half these items today. So the stuff that goes behind a wall in a bathroom, you need to order long before the stuff that sits on the ground after you've closed up the walls.

[00:27:26] So you have to stage it by when the products actually gonna be necessary. So we're [00:27:30] able to slice and dice these subset up into various groups of items in terms of when we purchase them and when we need them by, so we can communicate that over to our vendors. We then have our purchasing section where once we've approved an order, it's created an invoice, the client has paid that invoice, we then go into purchasing, splits it up by different manufacturer and factory for us to order it from.

[00:27:53] So we create PO lines, we add it to a po, and then we send the purchase order off to our vendors. At which [00:28:00] point we then track it, get it in. Share those dates with the clients. So we have a lot of automations in place where, let's say I had a promise date of June 5th for this item. If it's not going to be until June 10th, we have a trigger that emails the client and lets 'em know, Hey, your product's delayed, and then updates to the new promise date.

[00:28:21] We can create PDFs from here. So as I was griping about, we have let's see, I don't have any in here, but we have PDF creation that we can go in [00:28:30] and, and see the various copies of like a proposal to the client themselves and pricing on it. We then roll all this up. Into what we would call our dashboards here.

[00:28:41] So this is our pipeline. So we look at pro, and this is all dummy data that I stripped out in case any one of my competitors pops on and is interested in seeing our numbers. This is all our dashboard. Looking at Project Pipeline. We can filter it by salesperson, by or outside salesperson, inside salesperson for various [00:29:00] geographies.

[00:29:01] We can look at different dates and it shows us project values in the pipeline that have yet to be converted. And then we can jump over to what actually has been converted. So we have it split by month, down by quarter, and then we can look at how many actual conversions we had. And we can also filter and filter this by client or branch and again, by inside and outside sales person in order to see sort of trends, you know, like our average, average numbers on it.

[00:29:29] So [00:29:30] it's a lot of dashboard work. Lots of dashboards. 

[00:29:32] Dan Fellars: Yeah. 

[00:29:34] Kurt: Very cool. And that's, that's the crux of our system. That's the crux of what we build. 

[00:29:40] Dan Fellars: Awesome. What's been kind of the, you talked a little bit earlier about the acceptance of this. What, like what's been the impact of having this system for the business?

[00:29:54] Kurt: Sure. So are, when we were on Microsoft Dynamics, we had, there's. 10,000 [00:30:00] buttons when you go into a certain area, and you can hide some of 'em, but it, it gets a little funky. Our team, we had, as we started rolling this out, we would have weekly meetings where people would share what they wanted right. And what they, what they didn't like.

[00:30:13] As we were rolling out different functions and we would prioritize addressing as many of those as we could over just an actual function add or, or bug that we encountered. Because people would come in each week and their feedback was actually listened to. I. And incorporated into what they were using.

[00:30:29] So we were, we [00:30:30] were flying on it. So we used to be at about 21 to 28 days, so, you know, like three to four weeks on system onboarding when we were in a access, our initial system onboarding and dynamics. And we've cut that down to like a week where people are able to fly into it and get much better at it.

[00:30:47] And, you know, obviously it takes longer for people to master anything, but it's been much quicker in terms of people understanding what they're looking at. And we're stripping stuff out, right? Less is more. As we go through, [00:31:00] we're trying to pull out as much as we possibly can and live. Live super lean.

[00:31:05] Yeah. Cool. 

[00:31:06] Dan Fellars: And are you the main one maintaining it or you've got other people? That I 

[00:31:11] Kurt: was and it, that's when it became that three-headed monster that people had to re had to rebuild. So we went out, we now have a team of four developers in house that work in this all the time. Okay. But yeah, it, it was me and then mapped it all out in lucid chart, handed over to the team and said, go, go unscrew up [00:31:30] everything that I created a bird 

[00:31:31] outta.

[00:31:32] Kurt: But the, the be the re the strength of, of, or power of Airtable for us within this was a. I understood the business function, right? I had an in depth understanding of the business need, and whenever we try to go the other software platforms, because I didn't understand enough of the tech that it was being built on, I failed miserably at conveying all that business need over to them.

[00:31:54] And Airtable sort of bridge that gap for me and has made it much easier to communicate. That's cool. [00:32:00] That's a great advantage. Yeah. Huge selling point there. Awesome. And now tell us a little bit about your agency that you run now, it's also in this space. Oh yeah. So we do, I have an offshore staffing agency.

[00:32:14] We, we left I, so the, the building materials side of the world. I've moved on from that. And now I do offshore staffing teams in the Philippines for building materials companies. And believe it or not, that company's run on Airtable as well. We have a complete workflow in our, our accounting [00:32:30] software.

[00:32:30] Everything is Airtable There. I, I'm involved, as I mentioned in eo, so Entrepreneurs Organization on the, in Chicago, and we run the chapter on an Airtable in workspace there as well. Right. It just, it's gotten in my blood Yeah. 

[00:32:44] Dan Fellars: Everywhere for you. That's awesome. Yeah. 

[00:32:46] Kurt: Drink 

[00:32:46] Dan Fellars: some cooler except for, except for at home.

[00:32:48] Still working on that one. That's right. That's right. We'll see if I get there. Yep. Awesome. Thank you, Kurt, for sharing that. Thank you. And, okay, let's move [00:33:00] on. If you are not in our community, we invite you to join us. Built on air.com/join gets you in for free, gets you access to our Slack community with thousands of other Airtable users.

[00:33:13] And also subscribe to our newsletter, subscribe to our built on, on there YouTube channel and all of the other social platforms. We'd love to meet with you and hear what you've got going on. And there's lots of other people that are fans as well, just like Kurt, [00:33:30] who Airtable runs in our veins and we talk about it all day in the built on air community.

[00:33:34] So check us out with that. Finally, same table, back links. I think this has been like a top request since. As long as I've been around in Airtable 

[00:33:50] Kamille Parks: speaking at of as long as you specifically have been around. Here's a, a post from Dan from at [00:34:00] least five years ago. Alright. A script that does this. So this is what we've had to resort to and UKs and your modern air table back in my day.

[00:34:12] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Automations. And even before this, I think I had a Zapier Zap before, like mm-hmm. You could write scripts. 

[00:34:22] Kamille Parks: Yep. And Kevan has a, a product specifically built around maintaining them on an [00:34:30] automated basis. But like you said earlier, this is not something that they announced. It is just something that someone discovered.

[00:34:36] And I will kind of go over. What's changed? So Airtable is a relational database under the hood, and the benefit of having relational databases is depending on the type of relationship you have, if it's one-to-one, one to many or many to many, you'd be able to see specific information about [00:35:00] whatever the other object is you're linking to.

[00:35:02] So, prior to recently. If you were to link two tables together, like an employee can belong to a department as represented by this field here, I could go into the department's table and see all of the people who are linked to this department. I. From this direction and Airtable would manage these two fields simultaneously.

[00:35:26] So it didn't matter which table you made [00:35:30] the association in. If I unlink Lorraine from here, and then I scroll down to find where they are. That's weird. Am I, am I crazy? 

[00:35:39] Alli Alosa: No, it, it still says saving. It still says saving. 

[00:35:42] Kamille Parks: Okay. Thank you. I was like, well so Airtable iss not broken. It's just, I think slower where I am.

[00:35:48] There, there it goes. So if you edit it from there it edits here as well. And if I do it the other direction, it would also edit and it's very useful. However, for the longest [00:36:00] time somewhere around, I don't know, eight years or so if you linked a table to itself. Airtable didn't two linked record fields, it would just create the one.

[00:36:12] So same sort of situation. I have a list of employees and I wanna see who their manager is. I can create a field that links them together, but if I wanted to see all of. Tijuana's reportees, I would've to do a bunch of [00:36:30] interesting solutions in order to see the relationship in the other direction. Airtable has now made that, so that's no longer the case.

[00:36:38] So if I were to create a new linked record field and I link it to this same table, and I'm gonna call this manager. Airtable by default is going to create two fields. The naming convention is different from the normal implementation where if you link two [00:37:00] tables together, it will name the field that it automatically creates for you the same name as the table.

[00:37:06] This, it gives you the same name as the field you just created. Prefixed with the words from field. And my conspiracy theory is they took this long to add this feature because they were trying to decide what to name this field. But nevertheless, I can start linking people together. And when I do that, this [00:37:30] updates automatically and I can remove from the other field, just like when I did from the department's table.

[00:37:36] So, once you have these two in here, they work as you would expect, linked record fields to work. Both of them can have lookup fields and rollups and whatnot. Both of them can have counts. They really behave in, in no way that should surprise you. What I did wanna talk about a little bit is what Evans, if you already have a field in here that is a linked record field [00:38:00] linking to the same table.

[00:38:01] What you can't do if you duplicate this, that's not going to help you because now you have the same field. And there's no opposing field or inverse field, I think is what it's called under the hood. No inverse field is created when you duplicate. So if I get rid of this, the only way I figured out how to do this is if I take this and I convert it to single line text so I don't lose any [00:38:30] data.

[00:38:31] And then if I take this and turn it back into a linked record field, I.

[00:38:38] And skip. This goes back to how it was, and then it creates the opposing or the inverse field on the other side, and you could see it's already filled in. So if I kind of scroll, I think I, my example earlier was Tawana. Yeah. If I look at Tijuana's record, I could see all of the people that are reporting to them.[00:39:00] 

[00:39:00] My guess as to why this is, is if there's probably some new property or it might be the same property for the configuration settings for these fields that are hidden. It's called inverse field id. Whatever the opposite field ID, that's gonna be blank for fields that were created prior to this change and duplicating it is gonna carry over that blank value, I think is [00:39:30] why duplicating is not gonna help you.

[00:39:32] Mm-hmm. But converting it to something else and then converting it back is gonna sort of reset the settings, if you will. So now if you do it this way, there are pros and cons. I would say if you had any filters that were in a view and looking at the way that this table is set up, it would immediately break those filters and remove them from that view.

[00:39:57] So just be cautious about doing that. [00:40:00] There are other instances where whatever implementation you have would break and then fix itself. Like there are certain places, I believe within automations. If you had like a conditional step within an automation that's looking for a particular value. Of this field, it would break and then fix itself after you do that convert and then convert back option.

[00:40:26] And then I believe that's also the case for interfaces, but with [00:40:30] views, view filters immediately resolve themselves upon error, whereas the other filter like places within Airtable UI do not fix themselves. So just something to keep in mind. Hmm. 

[00:40:47] Dan Fellars: Yeah. And I, I was curious. I played with it. There's one use case where you actually don't really care about the, the reciprocal is if you link to yourself.

[00:40:57] So there are times mm-hmm. Where you actually [00:41:00] want to link to the same record. So I was like, oh, I, I did it and it created the back link. And I was like, I don't, I don't want the back link. And I tried to delete it, but then that resets your original to a text field. Mm-hmm. So you actually can't go back. 

[00:41:16] Kamille Parks: So if you do that, this is now just text.

[00:41:19] So it's kind of, it's an all or nothing. So what Airtable has said is, for any brand new linked record field, it's going to be [00:41:30] behave the same as all linked record fields. Yeah. Take it or leave it. Yeah. And something that you could do if I do. Edit and I change this back into a link and do this. I have, now I have my two linked record fields.

[00:41:51] I'll bring this over here. Something you could do is do edit field permissions and just say, nobody touched this. Just [00:42:00] use this one, and then you can name this. Like utility field or something like that to communicate to the other people in your base. Don't bother with this or ignore it if it's something that you don't need for your use case.

[00:42:13] And if it's one of the implementations, like you mentioned, Dan, where you're linking one record to itself, it's could be confusing. Why would you have two fields that have the same value? It seems redundant. Ignore it.[00:42:30] 

[00:42:31] Yeah, 

[00:42:33] Alli Alosa: I have a question, which is around the org chart extension. Mm-hmm. That requires you to use a self linking linked record field. Yep. And there's, it used to have a setting that's like, do you wanna use parent or child, children or parent, does this matter now because, or like, does this change.

[00:42:57] Because now we have the other field. [00:43:00] Do you need to switch the field that it's looking at for this to be accurate? 

[00:43:05] Kamille Parks: So I can flip back and forth Yeah. And end up with the same, right. So you have more freedom, I guess. If you wanna consolidate, depending on what plan you're on, you can see the dependencies of all of your fields.

[00:43:23] And if, if you don't wanna split dependencies amongst these two fields, you can like, choose to [00:43:30] say, I only wanna have things linked from the the children field, if you will. Or I only wanna have it from the parent field just so you can more easily see dependencies. Otherwise, it doesn't seem to matter.

[00:43:45] Cool. Hmm. Love it. That 

[00:43:48] Dan Fellars: makes sense. 

[00:43:50] Kamille Parks: Awesome. 

[00:43:51] Dan Fellars: Well, yeah, this is gotta be on everybody's top three wishlist items They finally [00:44:00] crossed off. I know Scott Rose keeps like a running list of. Features 

[00:44:04] everything. 

[00:44:05] Dan Fellars: Slowly but surely they're crossing 'em off. 

[00:44:08] Kamille Parks: Yes, 

[00:44:09] I'm excited for this, 

[00:44:11] Kamille Parks: this, this is one of the ones where, for the longest time I couldn't think of why Airtable wouldn't put this in.

[00:44:20] And, my, the reason I came up with was, what do you call this field, right? 

[00:44:26] Dan Fellars: To make it clear that it's the child and [00:44:30] 'cause otherwise you're updating the wrong one. Yeah. 

[00:44:33] Kamille Parks: Yes. So I think adding this makes a lot of workflows a lot simpler and. I'm glad to see it. It is baffling that it's not on the what's new page, and it wasn't announced on the community either.

[00:44:49] I have yet to figure out a rhyme reason or pattern as to which features that they announced and which ones they don't. Yeah. [00:45:00] Melanie, we might get Melanie back from Coda. This was one of the reasons why we went to Coda for the backlinks. Mm-hmm. These aren't the links. Links you're looking for.

[00:45:15] Exciting stuff. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. Let us know how you're gonna be using this new feature. I think that one, I wish there was like in the configuration of an existing one. 

[00:45:29] Yeah. [00:45:30] 

[00:45:31] Dan Fellars: Create backlink? Yes. Maybe, maybe I'll add that. 'cause, 'cause did you say, were you saying that if you switch it to a text field and then switch it back, if you had like lookup fields, it will self-heal or not?

[00:45:46] Kamille Parks: Oh, well, let's, let's test that. So the easy way to test this is to get a template. Which come, which were all created prior to this feature existing. [00:46:00] So we're gonna sit and wait. 

[00:46:02] Mm-hmm. 

[00:46:05] Kamille Parks: So now we're kind of reset back to before I did anything. So this linked record field with no inverse. I'm gonna add a lookup of email 'cause that seems to be filled out for everything.

[00:46:25] And then now same thing I did before [00:46:30] convert to text, which should break my email field. And then if I do link again, same table. It should link itself back together and fix this field. And then I have the inverse field created. Now when you do this, converting it to text and then back, just be aware that if you happen to have two people with the name Faith Butterworth Airtable is gonna pick [00:47:00] one of those two people and it might not link to.

[00:47:04] Whoever you originally had linked. So one way to make sure that you're absolutely certain and doing control. C doesn't delete the inverse field, which could be nice, could not be, depending on what your preference is. One thing I would recommend doing formula record id. Mm-hmm. I would [00:47:30] do. This, get a record ID for every single record.

[00:47:38] I'll put that over here. And then what I would do is I would get myself a lookup of the record id. So here reporting to is basically your manager. So here all of my manager's record IDs. What I would do to make sure that that's preserved is, well, you have two options, right? If, if the purpose is [00:48:00] to convert a field into a linked record such that it has the inverse, you could either convert this directly into a linked record field, and I'll show how to do that.

[00:48:12] Do this. So it will give me the same values, but know exactly which person to link to, even if there's two people with the same name. Mm-hmm. No record is gonna have duplicates of the same record id. And then I have my inverse field created at the end. [00:48:30] Or you can do. Let's say you have a bunch of dependencies already on this field and you don't wanna end up with duplicates.

[00:48:39] What you could do is convert this to single line text first so that this value is sort of stamped in place. And then you would change this one into single line text. What I would do is I would copy and paste all of the values over, and then I would convert this [00:49:00] back into a linked record. So. All of the values were gonna end up being the same in this field.

[00:49:08] I no longer need this. This field is created automatically and they're linking. And I know for a fact that all of these, when I converted from text back into a linked record, it links to the correct person because I was pulling directly from the record id. So I was specific about which Tijuana, which [00:49:30] Hazel, which faith.

[00:49:31] Right. 

[00:49:33] Dan Fellars: Yeah. That's a great strategy there. 

[00:49:36] Alli Alosa: Yeah. I think that's super helpful. Thank you for demoing that. Mm-hmm. 

[00:49:41] Dan Fellars: Awesome. And now you have same table back links. 

[00:49:48] Excited. 

[00:49:49] Dan Fellars: Yep. That concludes our episode and also our season 22. Thank you for being with us. We'll be off for some time and join us again in the future.[00:50:00] 

[00:50:00] We will have more episodes to come. So thank you all. Have a great week, and see you next time. 

[00:50:08] Thank you.

[00:50:23] Intro: Thank you for joining today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it. Be sure to check out our sponsor, OnAir Backups, automated [00:50:30] backups for Airtable. We'll see you next time on the Built On Air Podcast.