I’m managing my product database in Airtable with about 1350 different items and around 140 purchase orders from suppliers. The system also contains various other product information and details.
I need to calculate the total ordered quantity for each product across all purchase orders, but this task is beyond my current Airtable skills. The calculation needs to aggregate quantities from multiple PO records for each individual SKU.
I’m looking to hire someone with Airtable experience who can set up the proper formulas or automation to handle this inventory tracking. If you have the expertise to help with this project, please reach out with your availability and pricing information.
Been there! We had the same issue switching to Airtable for tracking purchases across suppliers. Here’s what solved it: create a line items table between your products and purchase orders. Each row = one SKU on one PO with quantity. Your products table can then rollup all quantities where SKUs match. The real work is importing your PO data correctly. If you’ve got multiple items per PO record right now, break those out first. Once your data’s structured right, the formulas take like 30 minutes. Data cleanup is where you’ll spend most of your time.
Skip the complex Airtable formulas and table relationships - just automate it. Manual rollups are a nightmare with 1350+ items.
I built this exact thing for our warehouse team. The automation watches for new purchase orders, grabs SKU and quantity data, then updates totals automatically. No junction tables or rollup limits to worry about.
Once it’s running, you’re done. New PO? Totals update instantly. Need reports? They generate themselves. Way cleaner than managing all those table relationships.
Takes about an hour to set up instead of paying someone for a multi-hour project. Connect Airtable, add quantity aggregation logic, done.
the rollup field method is solid for most cases. I’ve been using Airtable for inventory for ages and unless your case is super complicated, basic rollups should do the trick. Just properly link your product table to your PO line items and sum up the qtys. But you might wanna clean up your data first.
Had this exact problem when we started tracking inventory across 50+ vendors.
Yeah, rollups work, but here’s what nobody mentions - with 1350 items and 140 POs, your data’s probably a mess. Most people cram everything into single PO records with line items all jumbled together.
Fix your data structure first. I wasted months trying to band-aid broken relationships.
Set up three tables: Products, Purchase Orders, and PO Line Items. Line items is your bridge - one row per SKU per PO. Import your quantities there with proper SKU matching.
Then Products just needs one rollup field pointing to PO Line Items, summing quantities where SKUs match.
Took me 4 hours total - 3 hours cleaning data, 45 minutes for the actual Airtable setup once everything was clean.
Skip complex automations until you know the basic structure works.
Setting up inventory calculations in Airtable is pretty straightforward once you get your tables organized right. You’ll need a junction table to connect your Products and Purchase Orders - this lets you link SKUs with their ordered quantities. Then use a rollup field in your Products table to pull in totals from all the linked purchase orders. I’ve done this setup before and the key is making sure your data relationships are clean first. Otherwise you’ll run into problems with duplicate SKUs across different POs. Depending on what you’re working with now, expect to spend a few hours on this, especially if you need to restructure things.