The Ultimate Guide to Airtable in the Venture/Finance Industry

The Best Venture Capital/Finance Use-case Examples for Airtable

Using Airtable to keep track of Professional Relationships

A popular choice among Airtable users, making either a personal (one-to-many) database of connections or a company (team-to-many) database of clients or key contacts are both excellent options under the professional relationships umbrella of Airtable usage. This is especially true when keeping track of investors, service providers, or lendees. If you’ve ever spent time using a pre-built CRM you’ll know that many are plagued with either more cost for features you don’t use, or confusing data design. Bottom line, you probably want something that fits. 

People go to Airtable often in these circumstances because 1) it tends to match their budget better and 2) because it can be set up to match their exact needs. Here’s an example of Youtuber and Airtable expert Gareth Pronovost building a personal CRM from scratch in Airtable. When you’re setting up your own, be sure to play around with linked fields and multiple data types (e.g. calendar fields to track and display upcoming appointments) until you find your exact match. 

Managing an Investment Portfolio in Airtable

This one is especially for those VC firms out there, with many examples of accomplishing this in Airtable out there (like this one from BuiltOnAir Podcast guest Sydney Thomas). In the case of Sydney’s example, it doesn’t take a huge team to keep everything in order. Using Airtable and a team of enterprising people, her company is able to manage an impressive portfolio and all the details that go into it. 

When you’re setting up your Airtable to manage your database of founders, investors and companies, you’ll probably want to take some hints on how to organize the data from the example above also. Track portfolio growth in one table, portfolio founders (and all their “qualifyable” information like birthdays) in another. You can set up a table solely for storing company details, and another keep track of individual investors. You’ll also want a main view with all the information pulled together in one place for a high level view of company status. 

Deal Pipelines Built with Airtable

If you’re part of or managing a team of salespeople or similar, this option is a great place to start with Airtable. It’s important to lose the bloat or extra steps that slow the process of finding, qualifying and closing deals, and that’s why building it out in Airtable is a good idea. While many of the more robust team collaboration aspects of the app are behind a paywall, the free version has many excellent options for making an easy-to-access version of your own pipeline. 

You can see an example of a customized base built for this purpose here. Making a deal flow is simplified with multiple view options built into the app, including Kanban-style views for deal stage, owner, and quarter. Add into that a table for calls set up, another for appointments, and yet another for assigning tasks to team members, and you’ve got a powerful setup. You could also build in a list of products available, and any relevant notes for the interactions taking place. If you’re just getting started with this, we recommend copying the above base or one similar into your personal Airtable then tinkering as you get a feel for how to set it up. Once you’re using it on an ongoing basis, many of the paid tiers of the app add on features that will come in handy as you grow. 

Airtable for Client Interaction or Project Management

Another example we’ll share here showcases the Airtable app’s capability for helping a team accomplish goals l by storing and splicing a wide variety of data in one database. Using this Airtable base for reference, you can quickly see an example of how a design agency would set up their project management infrastructure. In the Design Projects table the main grid view serves as an overall conglamorate of all the projects currently undertaken. Included are fields for status, client (which could be made into a linked record field for an additional layer of capability), priority level, key dates, and linked fields for project lead and associated tasks. This table also has views for easy project status updates (Kanban view), projects complete (another Grid view), and a project (Calendar) view. 

Another great example of project management/client interaction with Airtable is this base built for a digital product agency. Developed by the company as the “complexity and number of projects grew along with the business, management of the spreadsheet in Google Sheets became too arduous—so [they] built this base.” This base has several of the project tracking aspects of the other base shared here, but also builds out a more robust set of tables for client interactions. They’ve included a Contacts table with the key people in an organization, along with all pertinent information. In this case there’s also an example Interactions table to keep an ongoing record what happens between agency and client. 

Finance and VC Examples from Experts on the BuiltOnAir Podcast

The BuiltOnAir Podcast is the place to hear from people living all over the world and using Airtable in every industry. We set it up as a place to get inspired by the stories of professionals and enthusiasts alike, and their uses for Airtable in their work and play. We’ve collected a few of the best episodes we did from professionals in the venture capital and finance industries for you to enjoy below. In each example you can either listen 100% audio or watch to see them demonstrate a database they’ve built in action. 

• Remy Margerum, CFO of Nomad Goods – In this episode, Remy walks through a thorough deep-dive into the Nomad Goods Backend base. During the episode we take a look at some of the advanced functions he’s built into the base and how they use Page Designer to generate shipping documents. Remy also discusses their approach to keeping their data secure in Airtable, while allowing their team the flexibility to use data however they need.
• Sydney Thomas, Venture Capital Expert – Sydney has become a voice in the world of VC, and has published two popular bases for it in Universe. During this episode she talks about the story of Precursor Ventures, how she developed an Airtable to manage a large portfolio with their small team, then finally demonstrates the mentioned bases and all their functional glory. 
• Alex Hillman, Educator and Serial Entrepreneur – Alex uses Airtable for multiple things in his various businesses he’s founded or work with. The main thing he’s using it for right now is as a system for keeping relationships up -both professional and personal. He showcases a system he built to keep track of students successes as a great example of interaction tracking in Airtable. 

Other uses for Airtable and Venture/Finance:

Generating and Tracking Invoices – if you’re in a field that requires working with multiple companies, or if you work as a consultant, this one can be a lifesaver. As you can see in this example, using the page designer block (premium Airtable feature), you’re able to make generating custom invoices a cinch. Some simple formatting of services offered, customers, and an actual invoice table allows for professional and quick printouts/deliverables of what you’re looking for. 

Personal Budgeting – Although not directly related to professional finance or venture capital, for many people Airtable presents the optimal solution for organizing many aspects of personal life. Budgeting is one of them. If you’re willing to do a little work upfront (or just copy a template from Airtable) you’re rewarded with a simple robust solution for tracking household income and expenditures. 

Managing Inventory – In this case, you can easily set up multiple data points (Unique IDs, distributors, locations, etc) to track what you have on hand. If you use 3rd party software to run your business, there are multiple integration options (see Products list below for some great ones) that make the whole system even more streamlined. 

The Top Video & Written Tutorials for Using Airtable with Venture Capital or Finance

Whether you’re totally new to the Airtable scene or have been here for a while, it’s always good to make things work the way you want them to. These tutorials are just that – a set of guides to help you meet your goals. The video tutorials are a great resource for seeing a complex solution in action, or simply for additional inspiration on that last piece your setup is missing. The written tutorials area source for specific answers to questions and sometimes a formula or two that you can copy directly into your database. Here are your tutorials:

Airtable vs. Google Sheets | Gareth Pronovost

• Ability to add all kinds of file types as attachments to any record within a base (pdf, xls, png, etc)
• Airtable’s view system, and the layers of functionality added by it
• The features for collaboration and audit trails of edits (by whom, when)

Airtable Demo: Tracking Your Sales Pipeline | Airtable

• Adding lines from an external spreadsheet into Airtable as new records
• Relationships of linked fields and deciding your preferred setup for them
• Using new views combined with filters for optimal data display

Get Financial Insights Using Airtable Blocks | Gareth Pronovost

• How to set up a chart block
• What the summary block does, and when to use it
• Linking an invoice’ actual collected date/amount to the dashboard for real-time data

Showcase: how we use Airtable to enable financial decision making | Optimi

This is a simple showcase/guide hybrid written by the team at Optimi about how they have made Airtable a central part of their automated financial projections each week. Their topic of interest for the showcase is a web dev academy they host for students in the New Zealand area. The main issue they were running into with their previous approach was lack of visibility for their financial status at any given moment. They were creating spreadsheets for each week’s invoices, and it made accessing the information to share with team members difficult.

With Airtable, they were able to build out a simple and automated invoicing and reporting system that met their needs nicely. The system they designed involved a simple input form that would update financial stats in their database, then output a weekly report into Slack with both the projected invoices and their likelihood of being completed. 

Some highlights from the guide:

• Summary of how to add invoices automatically to Airtable
• Functionality to record expected payments against invoices
• Setting up automated delivery of data into Slack from an Airtable base
• An approach to data transparency that enables quicker, more informed decision making

Guide to Airtable | Airtable

If you’re brand new to Airtable itself, this is the place to start. This getting started guide (published by the Airtable company) walks you through an overview of functionality, then the starting points for creating a database, setting up field types, adding records, linking between tables, using Airtable as a collaboration tool, filtering and sorting, and finally how to publish views of your database.

There is also an advanced tips and tricks section with links to keyboard shortcuts, a list of integrations, and the Airtable API. To go beyond the basics in the Guide to Airtable, use the tools and resources listed here in the Ultimate Guide to Airtable.

The Airtable power user’s guide | Airtable

This guide is exactly what it sounds like; a guide published by the Airtable team targeted at power-users. Once you’ve gone through the introductory guide and as you’re putting together your venture/finance database schema, chances are you’ll want to dip into this guide occasionally to get additional insights on all the capability available to you during the process.

Finding the Right Service Providers to Help Your Finance or VC Work with Airtable Thrive

By this point in the guide you should have a solid grasp of what uses you have for Airtable in your financial setup, and you have a few options for shortcutting the process of making your goals happen. One option is to build it yourself which -thankfully- in most cases is all that’s needed with how simple the Airtable app and support ecosystem are. Another great option is to get outside help from experts in Airtable to get set up or augment the core functions built into your workflows. Setting up a venture capital or finance schema in Airtable combined with the other tools you use can take some time. That’s why we added this section.

What follows is a list of several service providers, consultants or freelancers who have experience building things in Airtable. Some have many years of practice and have built accompanying tools to support your work. Several also offer ongoing support and maintenance of a system. We’ve picked this list out to give you a starting point for setting up your own VC or finance databases with Airtable. Here are a few great options:

Based in central Utah (“Silicon Slopes” as many people refer to it), Openside is the premium provider of products and services in the Airtable space, and has an impressive history of success stories. Starting off as a scrappy team of developers and programmers doing one-off projects for smaller businesses, they quickly developed a knack for building custom integration tools and implementing them for their clients. 

With time they garnered attention for the quality of their tools as they developed them, and began offering both tools and services to the Airtable userbase, from Yoga studios to Fortune 500 companies. With their main focus today being on helping businesses (including those in Venture Capital or Finance spaces) to make their workflows shine, Openside sets a standard for quality as the first fully dedicated service provider for Airtable.

Here are some relevant links to the things Openside does

Here are some relevant links to the things Openside does

• A list of products built/provided by Openside
• Services offered by Openside
• A case study on a VA loan company – the story of a Hawaii-based company using Openside’s services

A virtual CTO services company, The Digital Capital Company (TDCC) specializes in helping companies streamline decisions, reduce complexity and coordinate work. Especially geared toward the small-to-midsize business, Airtable forms a central part of their work. By taking care of a lot of the tech aspects of running a business, TDCC aims to help you leverage your time and work. If you’re in a place where you can see how much Airtable could improve your business but don’t want to dedicate the time to develop what you need, TDCC could be an excellent option. 

Some relevant links to TDCC:

• A Facebook group aiming to help web professionals using Airtable
• The steps they take to do good work

Bill French

An active contributor to the official Airtable community, Bill has spent years in the tech, security and AI spaces. He’s developed a library of tools for various platforms, one of which is an Airtable-enhancing search tool that allows unified searching across tables and bases -an incredibly useful capability. As of writing the tool is in beta with hopes of being released in the near future. 

Some links about Bill:

• A show and tell of the Airtable search tool he’s developed
• Another showcase of an Airtable shortcut, namely auto-tagging your records

Where to go from here

This is the official end of the Ultimate Guide to Airtable in the Venture/Finance Industry. We’ve pulled together a library of resources to help you with your goals, and here at BuiltOnAir we’re always finding more to add. This guide will continue to be updated and improved as new developments are in the in Airtable and data management spaces. Feel free to bookmark this guide and return as your projects grow, or as you goals shift and change with the industry. 

To stay in the loop for future developments in the world of Airtable, we’d love if you’d become a BuiltOnAir Insider by joining the official Slack group and newsletter updates. We share the latest happenings, relevant community threads, additions to the Airtable resource library, and metrics each week via the email updates. In addition, you’ll also be informed about new BuiltOnAir podcast episodes featuring experts from around the world. You can also subscribe directly to the podcast by clicking here and selecting either audio subscription or video through our Youtube series. Our whole goal is to give you every tool you need to do well in finance or venture with Airtable.

P.S. Want to see guides for other industries (including ecommerce, sales/CRM, and web professionals)? Click here to go directly to the list!