Airtable automation guide: 5 ready-to-implement workflows for your business

Productivity and efficiency are essential for the growth and prosperity of any business. In this regard, automation becomes a crucial tool. But one can easily wonder what to automate, where, how, and where to start. Don’t panic, that’s exactly what we’re addressing in this article.

Of course, we’ll place a major focus on nocode automation with Airtable. Airtable, as you surely know, has become a very powerful cloud platform for managing many business processes and tasks: project management, task management, CRM, database, and much more.

The most interesting thing about all this is that Airtable offers powerful no-code automation features that will undoubtedly allow businesses of all sizes to optimize their processes. And when we talk about automation, we mean saving time, increased efficiency, and conservation of resources and money, of course. Without further ado, let’s discover together how to make the most of the automations in Airtable.

What is Airtable Automation?

Before diving into the details, it’s essential to understand what Airtable automation is. Let’s start with the concept of automation itself. It involves planning and executing an action or a series of actions automatically without human intervention. Tasks are executed based on predefined criteria and parameters.

Airtable automation, therefore, means planning automated processes that run within Airtable or are triggered by Airtable events. To better understand the concept of events, refer to the following section.

To better illustrate the concept of automation in Airtable, let’s take the example of managing your SEO strategy on WordPress. If you regularly publish articles on your website or blog, manually handling metadata (titles, descriptions, tags, etc.) can quickly become complex and time-consuming. By structuring this data in an Airtable table, you can automate and optimize your SEO by syncing it directly with plugins like Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, or Rank Math.

This way, you enhance your productivity and organization while maximizing the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. Practical and interesting, isn’t it? Now, let’s explore in detail how automations work in Airtable.

Understanding Automation in Airtable

To successfully automate and harness the power of automations in Airtable, it’s essential to master several fundamental concepts: actions, triggers, webhooks. That’s what we’ll see in this section.

Actions

Actions represent the heart of automation processes, particularly in Airtable. An action is a specific task that you want to see executed automatically following an event or trigger.

For example, you can configure the automatic sending of an email when a task is marked as completed. In a team where one person’s work depends on another person, such a simple automation can be extremely beneficial in the long term.

Indeed, the strength of Airtable automation actions lies in their flexibility: they can be relatively simple or complex. It all depends on your specific needs and constraints.

Triggers

In an automation process, the trigger represents the element or event that initiates an action. Generally, an automation process will include a trigger followed by one or more actions.

In our example, the email is sent when a task is marked as completed. In this case, marking the task as completed is the event. The action, here, is sending the email.

This very simple process could be made more complex by adding additional actions. It could involve editing an invoice and sending it to a Drive for the newly completed task.

The advantage of Airtable is that it offers you a wide variety of possible triggers, ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated. For example, an action can be triggered when a new record is created, when a deadline approaches, or at specific times that you have defined.

It should also be noted that it’s not necessary for the actions or triggers to come from or take place in Airtable. The process can very well start following an event in Airtable or in another application connected to the platform. Understanding webhooks can help clarify this further.

Webhooks

Webhooks are used to facilitate communication between multiple systems. More specifically, they represent the gateway between Airtable and the outside world. Thanks to webhooks, it will be possible for your Airtable base to communicate with other applications and web services. And this offers almost infinite possibilities for automation.

Let’s imagine that you have a table for managing your team’s tasks. You store information such as time spent on each project, hourly rate, the client concerned, etc. Suppose that, in Airtable, you have defined a process that automatically generates the invoice for each completed project. On the other hand, you have your accounting software.

Thanks to webhooks or the use of the Airtable API, you can, for example, automatically synchronize your Airtable data (invoices, clients) with your accounting software in just a few seconds. In addition to saving precious time, this undoubtedly offers you the advantage of not making data entry errors.

Automation possibilities in Airtable

When it comes to automating Airtable, several possibilities are available. These can be categorized into three main approaches: native automation features in Airtable, integration with third-party automation platforms, and the use of specific extensions and plugins.

These three options can be combined and complement each other.

Airtable automation native features

First, Airtable’s native features provide a solid foundation for no-code automation. The platform offers simple yet powerful triggers and actions to efficiently automate workflows without requiring coding skills or technical knowledge.

With Airtable’s native automation features, you can easily set up logical conditions, chain actions, and create customized notifications. The built-in data formatting system also ensures the consistency of your information. Here’s an overview of some of Airtable’s native triggers and actions.

Examples of native automation actions in Airtable:

• Create a new record in a table
• Update a record in a table
• Search for a record
• Sort a list
• Generate content with AI
• Other actions

Examples of native automation triggers in Airtable:

• When a record meets specific conditions
• Form submission
• When a record is updated
• Clicking a button
• Receiving an email
• Other triggers

Third-party platform integration for Airtable automation

As we’ve seen previously, Airtable can easily communicate with many other systems and platforms thanks to its API. And that’s where we begin to realize the full power of automating Airtable.

In this case, integration with external platforms considerably extends the possibilities and allows for more sophisticated and dynamic workflow automations. Services like n8n, Make, or Zapier allow you to connect Airtable to hundreds of other applications.

This interoperability opens the way to create automated workflows that can involve multiple services simultaneously. For example, you can automate the creation of a task in Airtable when a new lead is added to your CRM, then trigger the sending of a welcome email via your marketing automation tool as well as a notification to your team on Slack.

Although automation platforms can offer synchronization with many tools at once, they still present a major challenge. Implementation can quickly require technical skills, a lot of time, and considerable effort for ongoing maintenance. The same applies to costs, which can become very significant in a short time.

The final solution we present offers a tailored alternative, ideal for meeting your specific needs.

Using plugins and add-ons for Airtable automation

Plugins and add-ons further enhance Airtable’s automation capabilities while providing businesses with a seamless and personalized experience. Unlike general automation platforms that can be used to patch together various automated processes, extensions and add-ons cater to specific use cases with truly tailored solutions.

Moreover, you benefit from a smooth integration and automation experience while maintaining full control over your budget.

At WP connect, we specialize in creating custom plugins and extensions that connect business tools to the WordPress ecosystem without requiring coding.

Now that we’ve covered the concepts of automation and Airtable automation, here are five concrete examples you can implement right away.

5 concrete examples of Airtable automation

Task management automation in Airtable

Efficient task management is crucial for project success and business growth. Given this importance, finding suitable solutions to manage and track project tasks is essential. Airtable excels at automating task management routines for increased efficiency.

Examples of actions you can set up:

• Automatically assign tasks based on predefined criteria
• Send task follow-up emails
• Set reminders for important deadlines (e.g., a product beta launch)
• Automatically update task status based on progress

With simple automations like these, you’ll save valuable time and avoid forgetting important tasks (something that happens quite often).

Data entry automation in Airtable

Data plays an important role in decision-making and optimizing internal processes today. However, poor quality data won’t serve you much purpose. And one of the major sources of errors occurs during data entry.

In this sense, the automation of data entry radically transforms the way information is collected and processed. For example, you can directly integrate web forms into Airtable or create interfaces to control the entry of valid data. Similarly, you can directly import existing data, normalize and validate it in order to perform analyses and processing on Airtable.

Customer feedback collection is a great example where data entry errors can be problematic. A mistake in a client’s email or phone number could prevent you from reaching them again. With Airtable, you can check upstream that a correct email address has been entered, but also automate a series of actions just upon feedback submission:

• Send a response to your customer acknowledging receipt
• Assign the processing of feedback to a collaborator
• Send a notification via Slack
• Add the customer’s address to a mailing list
• And much more

By detecting and correcting common data entry errors, Airtable automation ensures high-quality, consistent data while enhancing internal processes.

Reporting automation in Airtable

Keeping an eye on your performance, whether in terms of sales or order management, is essential for continuously optimizing your processes. And for that, automating report generation via Airtable is just an excellent way. You can create dashboards that update in real-time, offering a clear and up-to-date view of your important metrics.

Counting or calculation features allow you to highlight elements such as the number of products sold from your catalog, the average cart amount of your monthly sales, etc.

Even more interesting, periodic reports can be generated and automatically sent to the relevant stakeholders through the aggregation of other automated actions. Similarly, you can configure personalized alerts, signal situations requiring special attention, and more.

Airtable automation: calendars synchronisation

Calendar synchronization is another powerful use case for Airtable automation. Have you ever forgotten an important event or task simply because it wasn’t listed in your calendar? With Airtable automation, that won’t happen again.

You can connect Airtable with platforms like Google Calendar bidirectionally. Some possibilities include:

• Automatically creating Google Calendar events when a new task is assigned in Airtable
• Adding important tasks to an Airtable table for better tracking and time management
• Storing meeting start and end times in Airtable
• Automating email or app notifications
• Tracking real-time availability to avoid scheduling conflicts

WordPress automation with Airtable

At first glance, connecting WordPress and Airtable might not seem obvious. However, integrating these two tools leads to exponential productivity gains. Imagine being able to publish articles and pages on your WordPress site simply by changing the status of a row in Airtable…

Airtable is flexible and robust enough to plan your publication calendar. But you certainly wouldn’t want to waste your precious time reformatting all the design of your content in the WordPress admin panel. Know that the Air WP Sync plugin allows you to do this job well.

Once your content is ready on Airtable, it will just be exported to be published according to your presets. Beyond simply publishing, integrating Airtable with WordPress through Air WP Sync offers you many other automation possibilities:

• Managing site users from Airtable
• Publishing and managing job offers
• Media management
• Managing the SEO of your website
• Managing a blog network from a single interface
• and more.

The integration of Airtable with WordPress perfectly demonstrates the versatility of Airtable automation and NoCode. It allows you to centralize your content for successful organization and smooth management, while having a constantly updated site that’s relevant for search engines.

Finals thoughts

Although it may seem simple, nocode automation in Airtable offers a power of productivity and growth still unexploited by many companies. In this guide, we have presented the basic concepts for automating in Airtable, along with 5 concrete use cases:

• Automating task management
• Automating data entry in Airtable
• Automating dashboard creation
• Automatically syncing calendars
• Automating your WordPress site with Airtable

By intelligently combining different automation possibilities, you can create workflows that not only save time but also improve the quality and reliability of your operations.