5+ Ways to Use Airtable in Your Business
If you’re like me, the first time you heard (or looked) at Airtable, you thought, “When would I ever use this?! It looks cool, but what are the use cases?”
Fast forward 18 months, and that question has been answered. Now, in nearly every project that deals with any form of data, I ask, “Can we use Airtable for this?”
My favorite way to describe Airtable is to imagine Google Sheets and a database having a baby. But, while that represents the general idea, it only scratches the surface.
Lately, my team and I have been leveraging Airtable across so many projects. We even started using it to manage BGBO Co.
For example, our internal solution gives us:
- A central source of truth for all client, contact, and project information.
- A client and project brief generator (which are dynamic documents, instead of being static and having to be manually created)
- An executive dashboard that includes forecasts and other key metrics
…and it’s super straightforward to manage.
Here’s a screenshot of an example Client/Project brief 100% generated by data in Airtable.
We’ve taken this beyond Airtable and embedded these dynamically-generated briefs into our ClickUp account. This way, our team can get read-only access to all the vital information about a client and project, but without accessing the actual data that powers it. And without needing to leave the platform they are working in. When something changes in the data, the briefs update in real-time.
Behind the scenes, we are tracking and storing more information than what’s shown in the brief. But, that’s used in executive dashboards and isn’t accessible to teams that don’t need access.
If you’re wondering whether Airtable (or a similar solution) might be helpful in your business, here are the scenarios that I’ve found useful:
- Centralizing data and creating a single source of truth
- A hub for automation across other platforms your teams use
- An easy way to create dashboards related to the data you use in your business
- A simple way to store data and then view it in many different ways (usually providing fresh perspectives on data you’ve been looking at for way too long)
- A tool to present only the necessary data, not all of it
- A way to build light-complexity solutions such as workflows that involve data
If you think it might be a good fit for your business or have tried to get it going in the past, feel free to reach out!
