4/30/2024 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S18-E05

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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.

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 Ronen Babayoff from EasyApps.

Eazyapps LLC was founded by Ronen Babayoff, an experienced Israeli high-tech entrepreneur, after he identified the huge need in the market for advanced easy to use apps that are tightly integrated with Airtable and monday.com. Easyapps mission is to help advance the no-coding revolution led by platforms such as Airtable, by providing the easy to use apps needed to trully allow no-coders to build workflows that meet the exact needs of their teams and organisations.

Visit them online

An App a Day – 00:01:41 –

Watch as we install, explore, and showcase the EasyInvoice App from the Airtable Marketplace. The app is described as “Easyinvoice is a custom Extension that allows you to generate invoices directly from your base data. It supports all major payment providers, and it's the only solution we know of that supports splitting invoices into multiple payments.”.

View App

Audience Questions – 00:01:42 –

Kamille Parks answers the Airtable question: “How to Pull Data by default from another table once a record is created”

View the question in the community

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

Ronen Babayoff – Founder, EasyApps

Meet Ronen Babayoff from EasyApps.

Eazyapps LLC was founded by Ronen Babayoff, an experienced Israeli high-tech entrepreneur, after he identified the huge need in the market for advanced easy to use apps that are tightly integrated with Airtable and monday.com. Easyapps mission is to help advance the no-coding revolution led by platforms such as Airtable, by providing the easy to use apps needed to trully allow no-coders to build workflows that meet the exact needs of their teams and organisations.

Visit them online

Segment: An App a Day

Start Time: 00:01:41

Airtable App Showcase – EasyInvoice – Easyinvoice is a custom Extension that allows you to generate invoices directly from your base data. It supports all major payment providers, and it's the only solution we know of that supports splitting invoices into multiple payments.

Watch as we install, explore, and showcase the EasyInvoice App from the Airtable Marketplace. The app is described as “Easyinvoice is a custom Extension that allows you to generate invoices directly from your base data. It supports all major payment providers, and it's the only solution we know of that supports splitting invoices into multiple payments.”.

View App

Segment: Audience Questions

Start Time: 00:01:42

Airtable Question – How to Pull Data by default from another table once a record is created

Kamille Parks answers the Airtable question: “How to Pull Data by default from another table once a record is created”

View the question in the community

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 Eastern and join our active [email protected]. Before we begin, a word from our sponsor on. On2Air 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 On2Air Backups at on2air.

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[00:01:37] Dan Fellars: Welcome back. We are in episode five of season 18. Good to be back with you live myself, Dan Fellers and Camille Parks back and want to welcome Ronan. Welcome Ronan to the show. Thanks for having me. We'll we'll learn more about Ronan and his background and story coming up on the show. But first I'll walk us through [00:02:00] what we're going to be doing today.

[00:02:02] It's always for an hour long show going through four different segments to keep you all up to date on Airtable and everything going on in this world. We always start with our round the bases of what the communities are talking about, and then we'll share quickly on our sponsor onto our backups, and then we'll learn about Ronan and his background and how he came into this world.

[00:02:25] And this world of air table and then Ronan's going to share with us one of his apps easy invoice and how that works and talk about some of his others. Then we'll talk about how you can join our community if you're not part of us. And then finally, Camille is going to walk through a question on from the community and answer it for us.

[00:02:48] ROUND THE BASES - 00:02:49 Okay. With that around the bases first, we'll start off with with some comedy. This was a tweet. [00:03:00] If you follow the NFL this was kind of a video of It was kind of controversial. The Atlanta Falcons drafted a quarterback that everybody was kind of surprised by, and this is the general manager kind of explaining it to the owner of the, of the, of the team as to why they drafted that person.

[00:03:20] Cause everybody was kind of confused by that draft pick, but then comparing it to to air table, it says, trying to explain why you just, Signed a four year NetSuite contract to your startup CEO, instead of continuing to use Airtable and Google sheets. So it's kind of a tough explanation of why did we do that?

[00:03:41] Kamille Parks: I mean, yeah, 

[00:03:41] Dan Fellars: four years is 

[00:03:44] Kamille Parks: it's pretty long for a startup. 

[00:03:46] Dan Fellars: Yep. Yep. Somebody in the comments said, okay, so after four years you may have it finally implemented referring to NetSuite versus the speed of Airtable. Here's [00:04:00] another one. Boomer IT manager versus Airtable builder talking about the change and Mark Zuckerberg.

[00:04:08] So I don't know. I don't think I'm quite Boomer yet, but, funny thing is this is the younger version of Mark and he's kind of transformed his body. 

[00:04:19] Kamille Parks: All you need is a, is a, an appropriately sized gold chain. 

[00:04:26] Dan Fellars: Yep. That's right. That's right. And grow out a beard, go to the tanning salon and pick up a mixed martial arts like Mark has.

[00:04:39] Okay. All right. Enough of the comedy. So coming out this one, actually, I didn't see anybody talking about this, but there was a new news to 

[00:04:47] Kamille Parks: me. Yeah. 

[00:04:48] Dan Fellars: Yeah. So now Apple pay and Google pay support came out. Now what does that look like? Let's see where payments can now be made via Apple pay. [00:05:00] Oh, I guess this is just signing up for Airtable.

[00:05:03] So it's not a feature in the app. It just means you can use Google Pay or Apple Pay to pay for it. 

[00:05:10] Kamille Parks: Okay. Yeah, I was going to say this is like a major thing. If it's, there's two other places I could imagine this going. One in the marketplace. If you wanted to sell an extension or an app, right? And rather than having a subscription service, like some of my apps have, you know, through a separate website, you just pay directly through the marketplace or alternatively, like on an air table form if they added, like collect payment details, but where does that information go?

[00:05:41] And they just became HIPAA compliant. My brain for a second was like, what is going on? You can't just drop payments as a new feature. 

[00:05:53] Dan Fellars: No press release. Yeah. That would be huge. So yeah. 

[00:05:56] Kamille Parks: All right. That makes more sense. Pay for your time 

[00:05:59] Dan Fellars: using this, [00:06:00] but at the same time, it's like, should this be like in the feature?

[00:06:05] What's new? I don't know. 

[00:06:08] Kamille Parks: Yeah. 

[00:06:10] Dan Fellars: It's not really a feature product release. 

[00:06:14] Kamille Parks: Sure. 

[00:06:16] Dan Fellars: But anyways, okay. If you were dying to pay with Apple pay, now you can. All right. Next one. Just, an announcement. They hired a head of infrastructure engineering. So yeah, just kind of Just a tease. So they're, they're beefing up their, their infrastructure team.

[00:06:41] He says they'll be focusing on and improving the platform's reliability, scaling it to the new, meet the needs of our growing enterprise customers and enabling key product capabilities such as Airtable AI. So that's good. They're, they're beefing up there. Their infrastructure [00:07:00] team. One more from LinkedIn.

[00:07:06] Oh yeah. And this is good timing with Scott mentions fill out supports payment on forms, which is very cool. Yeah. Fill out is an amazing product. On the form side, if you haven't used it, it really is a powerful tool on the form side. But now they released a new feature fill out scheduling so that you can actually kind of like a Calendly competitor.

[00:07:29] So you can actually use fill out to connect to your calendar and set up scheduling and kind of use their, their form builder. And then it has the direct tie in to air table. So like any calendar, you could automatically drop a row into air table. So. That's pretty cool. Actually I played with it.

[00:07:53] It's still lacking a little bit of features. I use Calendly. I'm not quite ready to move off of it, but [00:08:00] maybe with a few more feature releases, I might consider it. 

[00:08:05] Kamille Parks: Yeah, this was a pretty exciting. I myself don't have any forms that are in fill out. Seems to be a great product and adding the calendar.

[00:08:15] component to it. It's pretty exciting for me because I have you know, all, for some reason, all of my apps are calendar related. And this is probably the more extensible version of what I built just internally using their tables API. So this would probably be where I would put, or I would direct people if they were like, Oh, Can your extension do this?

[00:08:44] And the answer is no, probably something like fill out or Calendly is still a great option, but you could do more with fill out because it's, you know, such an advanced form builder on top of now calendar capability. 

[00:08:59] Dan Fellars: Yeah. [00:09:00] Anyways, these guys are super impressive. I've been impressed with them. To be honest, like fill out was one of the main reasons I pulled out of the form space with our onto air.

[00:09:13] And, and why we, one of the reasons we focused on just one, they were, they were just great. Crushing it with their forms. And so these guys produce a lot of features and functionalities similar to Ronin we'll learn about as well. Okay. Moving on to, to YouTube. We haven't done YouTube in a while. So a couple of interesting videos.

[00:09:36] If you're looking for how to, if you use Figma and Airtable, this is a tutorial on how to sync Airtable spreadsheet content to Figma. So that might be of interest to, to anybody in the design world wanting to connect Figma. And then there was one more video that caught my attention. This one from Mitch Acer [00:10:00] talking about air table AI.

[00:10:02] And he goes into, you know, some of the, the examples, but he also brings up a point of like how expensive it is if you're trying to do heavy, heavy tech stuff and then, And he talks about, and then he, he has a follow up video, recently talking about, other ways that you can do it that are actually cheaper than using the built in.

[00:10:31] So if you run into limitations with air tables, API, as far as like. I like it, but it uses up too many tokens for, for how much they're charging. There are cheaper ways that you can do it. So in this tutorial, he uses make to, to go directly to open a eyes API or anthropic. So anyways, if you're exploring the AI world, here's some tutorials on that.

[00:10:58] All[00:11:00] 

[00:11:02] right, moving on. We've got from the built on air community. This was a question asked from Ben Bailey. How can I get Airtable to understand Unix time? And I believe from Unix time he's referring to, so in the computer world, I don't know how 1970 became, I don't know, Ronan, if you know the history of this.

[00:11:26] How 1970 became like the center of the universe. But that's how computers talk. Like they keep a millisecond count of every millisecond after January 1st of 1970. So if you need a date before 1970, I think it's negative numbers. 

[00:11:45] Ronen Babayoff: I think the world started because of the disco ball. The shining one.

[00:11:50] That's when the world started. 

[00:11:52] Dan Fellars: Yeah, makes sense to me. That's right. That's right. And so that's why he's referring to is how do you, how do you, how do you know the [00:12:00] time in the millisecond or the second depending on, you know, how many places you want to count? And so Josh here gives the answer of you can actually use an X variable in the daytime parse and it returns the number.

[00:12:18] Kamille Parks: I feel like I should know the answer off the top of my head, but I do want to point out for putting in the X, whether or not its capital does change something. I forgot exactly what, but there are two X variables. Both of them are Unix related and one of them does something and the other does something else.

[00:12:37] I think it has to, I don't know if it has to do with offset. I'm going to, Search. 

[00:12:42] Dan Fellars: Yeah, it might be. It might be seconds versus milliseconds. 

[00:12:47] Kamille Parks: That is probably it. So it is relevant. I promise. 

[00:12:52] Dan Fellars: Yeah, yeah, you can look that up real quick. But anyways, this is this is very, oh, yeah. [00:13:00] So that's where, Justin chimes in one counts milliseconds and the other doesn't.

[00:13:06] Yeah. Like I mentioned. So, but it's useful if you're ever doing like math with dates or, and trying to, or get a unique identifier timestamp, that that's easier to, to reference maybe. So that might be the use cases for, for using that. 

[00:13:25] Kamille Parks: And the lowercase x is the one that does millisecond. 

[00:13:31] Dan Fellars: Okay, so uppercase does seconds.

[00:13:33] Yes. Awesome. Very good. There we go. Yeah. Okay, next one. Okay, here's one. Scott talks about, the challenges of dealing with numbers being zero versus an empty field. And I [00:14:00] think we've talked about this in the past, but it's always a good reminder of because you can have a number field that's blank, right, that you haven't typed into yet that is treated differently than if you were to enter a zero in there.

[00:14:14] Kamille Parks: Yeah, I I'm in this thread pretty far down, but it's I related it to how it's handled in JavaScript, which is fairly similar in that there's the there's true wish and false false ish values. And while zero is not blank, it is false ish. And so Air tables formulas kind of treat zeros the same way that plain JavaScript does.

[00:14:42] But the problem there is JavaScript has two different equals operators. Double equals means the same with type conversion and triples equals means like definitely the same. So if you put zero in quotes next to [00:15:00] zero, not in quotes, those are not the same because one is a string and the other is a number there's no.

[00:15:06] Similar thing for irritable. You kind of have to force it. So someone in this thread, I forget who it might have been Josh, but later confirmed by Kavan. If you use your number field and then do an ampersand and then empty quotes, you force the number to be converted into a string. And then. Airtable is able to say whether or not that string is false ish.

[00:15:29] For strings, it's either blank or it's not. For numbers, there's that third quasi condition for zero. So it's fairly confusing if you, if you have like no frame of reference and it's not really explained. Anywhere I think in documentation. So having not known JavaScript, this could seem like this doesn't make any sense at all.

[00:15:52] Why? Why would it behave this way? I could see why it would behave this way, but I would want At least a different [00:16:00] operator. Right now we just have one equal sign. I would like a double equal sign to, you know, have that type conversion in there without having to do ampersand quotes. 

[00:16:14] Ronen Babayoff: I can say that my rule of thumb, I always when building our table formulas, I'm just comparing to black.

[00:16:19] If I look, expecting a blank fit, I will always compare to blank and I will not take, I will not trust any tyranny of those conversions. And it's also for simplicity, for reading it easier. I also have to share that, I don't know, long, long time ago, I even remember that they treated differently empty strings and nouns, and then I needed to count characters.

[00:16:39] But I think that has been solved a long time ago, like with their calendar. But I don't remember. I can look it up. In my email because I reported it at the time, 

[00:16:50] Dan Fellars: I'd be curious, you know, air table now has the AI formula builder. I'd be curious to see how smart the AI is. If you gave it a problem [00:17:00] like this, like determine if it's blank.

[00:17:02] Kamille Parks: Well, I am too, because I'm reminding myself the last bit. The top comment that we kind of see is the last bit of my very long explanation. I kind of point out that blank isn't actually blank. It's false. So it's like it's to me. It's a misnomer. I think it kind of adds to the confusion because zero equals blank is true.

[00:17:27] And that doesn't make sense 

[00:17:29] Dan Fellars: should be should be blankish. 

[00:17:31] Kamille Parks: Yeah, or no. I mean, I don't know. So I think there's some terminology things in air table formulas that I'm curious if the AI generated formulas would accurately pick up nuances like this. Yeah. 

[00:17:52] Ronen Babayoff: Yeah.[00:18:00] 

[00:18:00] Dan Fellars: And here Scott says blank function also doesn't work properly for number fields. If you're expecting different results for zero empty. Very true. There you go. We could, we could that could be the name of another segment. Blankish.

[00:18:19] All right, one more from the built on your community. Oh, no, it's the same one. So we are done. All right. Yeah, it's pretty relatively quiet week. No major major feature releases. So maybe we are coming to the end of the month. A lot of times they like to do stuff at the end of the month. So maybe maybe today this afternoon, there might be some some feature updates.

[00:18:42] I did see actually, I forgot there was another mention of, that There was a lot of talk on the dynamic linked record or link filters, and mentioning that they are planning to [00:19:00] make improvements to it. So, you know, because we've, we've gone through, you can't use, 

[00:19:07] Kamille Parks: select fields. 

[00:19:10] Dan Fellars: And so hopefully they didn't say exactly what's coming, but they said it's still very much in, in development.

[00:19:17] So that was good. All right, let's move on. 

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[00:19:57] MEET THE CREATORS - 00:19:59 Cool. [00:20:00] Ronan, tell me again, how would you say your last name? Ronan Babayov. 

[00:20:08] Ronen Babayoff: It's a Russian name. My grandparents came from Russia. 

[00:20:11] Dan Fellars: Oh, very good. Let me change our mode here and get you on the big screen.

[00:20:18] Cool. Tell us a little bit about your background, your history, and then walk us through how you came into the world of Airtable. 

[00:20:25] Ronen Babayoff: Yeah, so background. Learned computer science in Israel. I was a I have more than 25 years of experience in the high tech industry. I was a city of multiple Silicon Valley startups even lived in San Francisco for a few years.

[00:20:40] And I actually came into side notes. I saw this background is where I live. I currently live in the Dominican Republic. on my surf beach. So this is my view from my balcony. I always recommend everybody to come here. It's a beautiful place and where I live is the center of aquatic [00:21:00] sports. So amazing experience.

[00:21:01] I actually had a client of mine that came out here with his family and enjoyed it like crazy. He's planning to come back. But going back, how did I, how did I get into Airtable? I actually decided then. I think it was in 2016, 17 to take a little break from high tech and I actually became an environmental activist and became kind of the unofficial CIO of multiple NGOs in Israel, where I come from, and Because I'm in technology.

[00:21:32] So the best thing that I could help those environmental causes is using technology. And this is where I fell in love with Airtable. 2018. I got introduced to Airtable and all of those NGOs were really low budget at the time. So, So the free plan was really attractive for them, and I just fell in love with our table immediately because I remember I'm sitting with heads of department NGO department in NGOs while they're talking.

[00:21:58] I'm already building the base [00:22:00] for them at the end of the meeting. They already have a semi functional base. So we used it from to do to use a table from volunteer sign up and routing into organization. And the routing of volunteers into organizations to managing of transportations of thousands of people to protest.

[00:22:21] We like the one of the NGOs was the biggest grassroots environmental and environmental organization ever in the history of our country. And what else? Transcript managing products, translation projects, legal projects and so many different types of things with their table. And but at that time and stop if you have questions, let me know.

[00:22:45] At that time, I also saw a huge opportunity like you saw of actually building apps on top of our table. Which work directly with air table data like fill out like many extensions like others [00:23:00] And I was waiting for more than a year for a table to open their extensions about place. Then it was called the blocks Air table blocks in order to launch and I started building actually a form builder for a table called easy form Which I eventually I will not go into the details why I launched it for another platform And it's still live in the other platform for our table.

[00:23:22] We participated my we participated in their table hackathon. I actually submitted three extensions to their table hackathon. One of them, one easy fields, easy fields as a free extension that allows you to generate country. Month and day of week, a field, single select fields in any word language. And the data comes out of, standards on do like a standard organization that standardized this type of information.

[00:23:50] So if you haven't checked it out, check it out yet. So that's what we did for, for a with a with extension marketplace. Initially, we [00:24:00] also have like a remix with GitHub kind of a open source, project. That is a one of the first that you could remix from GitHub with our table. And But again, we needed to pay our bills, and this is where we started to do private, private development services of extensions for our customers.

[00:24:22] And our first customer that found us was actually the customer that that we're going to, the product we're going to present today, which is EasyInvoice. Interesting story about that. Oh, you have questions before I'm 

[00:24:35] Dan Fellars: Yeah, I'd be curious, yeah, before we jump into the, to the product. Curious. You know, I'm always interested.

[00:24:42] Like I also come from software, traditional software development and, you know, Airtable is, I imagine you've worked with databases of millions, trillion, billions of, of data points. And so coming to Airtable, it's like nothing like what you can do with, [00:25:00] with more traditional databases. What was the intrigue that you saw, like the future of Airtable coming with your background?

[00:25:08] Ronen Babayoff: So for me, it was, you know, I always from from very early and using CTO and choosing different types of search services for my startups because I was a CTO. So I was the one responsible for choosing the best technology out there. And also, if the best didn't work, develop our own custom solutions internally.

[00:25:29] It always drove me crazy how I'm going. I'm, I'm using a certain sass, but then I cannot change it and modify to my exact use case. I cannot modify to my exact use case. And then if I could not modify to assess spending tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to build my own custom build solution and air table, really like for me, there are the leaders of the no coding revolution.

[00:25:52] Like they made it so simple for me to basically build and. Internal workflow app or whatever for my own business. [00:26:00] And I can configure it to my exact needs, configure it to my exact needs. So this is where the this is where the, where I fell in love with it. So finally I'm not stuck with a third party SAS, product that I can just not extend or configure.

[00:26:18] I don't have this status. I don't have those fields. They don't support metadata fields. All of this with Airtable, everything becomes really simple. Not only that, like building with Airtable is just fun. It's like Lego. You can easily do these things. Yes, there is a limit with records. So, for example, I can tell you what we did with EasyForm for another platform, which still we use Airtable as our CRM, but like, for example, all of the how the form is going to look.

[00:26:46] And all the submissions and stuff like that, which I could easily hit the air table record limit. We just use another database. We used firebase and just synced essential data from firebase into air table. That's what [00:27:00] we did. So yes, there is this limit. But from what I heard is air table are looking and hopefully with this hiring of the infrastructure and head of infrastructure.

[00:27:09] There are going to do want to go in more and more into big data. And I think that they should go into that space because the competition is definitely, will if not only supported also is going into this area. So I hope that once they go into big data, so all of those use cases where I had to Actually go to third party databases in order to complement my table solution, I will be able to do all everything in her table.

[00:27:37] Of course, there needs to be also like which they already have, like webhooks and A P I limits needs to be increased a little bit and stuff like that in order to truly work with big data. 

[00:27:51] Dan Fellars: Cool. Tell me One last question. Tell me your favorite feature of air table and biggest wishlist item. [00:28:00] Well, 

[00:28:01] Ronen Babayoff: my favorite feature these days is actually interfaces and those in general, all of the type of, because, you know, especially the fact that interfaces, you can basically create, views that are specific to the person, to the actor.

[00:28:18] Let's say to the to that specific person. So dynamic filtering of work. It's based on that person's role in the company. And, you know, in the past, you know, it's like we had to create views. And that's actually feature also asked between two years ago views for each and every person in the company. Now.

[00:28:33] You know, all of this, let's call it a boilerplate time wasting work. You don't need to do that anymore, which is great. And the biggest feature for me, not only for me, I think for all of our customers, like we have customers that are really suffering because there are no, they don't support extensions and interfaces.

[00:28:49] So everybody moves on to, to, to interfaces, including our biggest customer, Riot Games, and because they couldn't move the extensions. that we built [00:29:00] for them. We built like really advanced heat map view extension that two years later air table launched into the part of their timeline view. And it's still more advanced than the heat maps that air table provides.

[00:29:11] But because wide gaze moved everybody to interfaces The use case of using our extension and the huge benefits that our extension provides for them is not available for them. And for us as an EarthTable partner and extension developer, it's also, it's, it's hurting us. But again, more than anything, I'm talking about the customers.

[00:29:30] I'm talking about the customers. And especially now that they're going into, like, you know, they're looking more at use cases that you can do with software, no local. Where like soft and local supports code and iframe embeds and even dynamic ones. Software as both of them have like really support for dynamic embeds based on the logged in user, which is amazing.

[00:29:50] So again, I think that Airtable needs to go into that space as well in order to truly support all the use cases that their customers out there need. [00:30:00] 

[00:30:01] Kamille Parks: I'd say I'm a little surprised that we don't have HTML embeds, just just generic ones. And from an extension developer standpoint, I can see several, if not most of the extensions being incompatible with the interface environment, and they'd need some sort of update in order to like.

[00:30:22] Understand the new context they're sitting in also as a developer, I'm fine with making those changes, but give me the option to do so, you 

[00:30:31] Ronen Babayoff: know, exactly. And, you know, it can be just a simple start with static embeds. That's a no brainer. And then with dynamic embeds, the only thing I need right now is give me the record ID from the manual.

[00:30:43] Yeah, that's it from there. I can work with anything like we can work with that. 

[00:30:48] Kamille Parks: There are so many people who want to just put an image, just a static image somewhere on their interface. But in order to do it, you have to upload the image to some random record and then find some way to include it [00:31:00] as like a record picker and just to get like your logo and in the top right of the screen.

[00:31:05] And so it's little things like that that can be solved with simple static embeds that just aren't there yet. 

[00:31:14] Dan Fellars: Yep. Excellent. 

[00:31:16] Ronen Babayoff: You 

[00:31:16] Kamille Parks: hear us on the table? 

[00:31:17] Dan Fellars: Yes, I know. You have three 

[00:31:19] Kamille Parks: different developers all telling you the same thing. 

[00:31:22] Dan Fellars: Yep. Very good. But again, it's 

[00:31:24] Ronen Babayoff: for our users. It's for our clients. It's not for us.

[00:31:26] Yeah. 

[00:31:26] Dan Fellars: Right. Right. 

[00:31:28] Okay. If you want to share your screen, we'll transition over to your product. 

[00:31:33] AN APP A DAY - EASY INVOICE - 00:31:33 So Walk through easy invoice with us. 

[00:31:41] Ronen Babayoff: And an interesting case, how did this customer find us in order for us to develop easy invoice for him? It's a company called Vermont farm table, and he got burned with software development projects.

[00:31:52] So he spends, he spends more than a hundred thousand dollars on failed software development projects, where he wanted to have a single [00:32:00] source of truth system where he can generate invoices also directly from this app. And I have all of those, the payment sync back into the system and he failed. He failed.

[00:32:09] He failed. And then he also fell in love with our table, but he was looking for a developer. That's going to be able to build. Exactly is invoice. So generate invoices directly from his or table data and I have all payments in back so it can be integrated as part of his workflow. So when you do the deposit, you can immediately launch the start building the order and he find us to the GitHub open source data projects extensions that we've built and we published to the GitHub.

[00:32:34] So he was looking for good table developers in GitHub. That's how we came across me us. Yes, 

[00:32:42] Kamille Parks: I would never think to look for an Airtable developer off of GitHub. However, we're certainly there. 

[00:32:48] Ronen Babayoff: Yeah, I was surprised as well that they found me like this. I was really surprised. I didn't expect it. Okay, so I will share my screen.[00:33:00] 

[00:33:02] Okay, so this is a kind of, the solution is basically both a base and an extension. And the base is a standard, a base that holds orders. And you can see me, right? So think of the sales table is basically the orders tables. Every order can have multiple line items. And then we also manage all of the, it also manages all of the clients in the space, which means companies, contacts, every company can have multiple contacts.

[00:33:32] Every contact can have, and every company can have multiple addresses. So all of those different types of things, and the extension that we pulled is on the right hand side. And basically in order to load. a sale. I'm just clicking on load this sale on this button and let me just make it full screen. So what we did here, we, you know, we take all of everything you see on the screen is basically air table data.

[00:33:59] Okay. This is [00:34:00] data coming out of air table. So the sales summary is coming from the sales table. The line items are coming from the line items tables. The transactions are coming from the transactions table. And now I want to generate an invoice for this order. Okay. So I'm generating an invoice and one of the thing and when I generate the invoice, I can I have the default contact is the main company content, but I can also select the different shipping contact.

[00:34:27] I can select an address, a different address for billing and shipping. And we also support like tax name discounts. Like at the base level, we created a way for having like company level discounts, contact levels, discounts, sales specific discounts. So all of this is integrated into the product as well.

[00:34:48] You can have different tax rates for different invoices. You can, you know, you have the line items. You can have the tier. So all of those kind of an interface on top of [00:35:00] an interface of top of vertical that is specific for generating invoices. And then one of the requirements that we have, and this is important, is he was looking for an in a payment provider that supports multiple payments per invoice in order to support his workflow.

[00:35:16] So his workflow, for example, he splits an invoice into a deposit and a balance, and he only starts working once you do a deposit. So we were able to, we were looking for us for a payment provider that supports multiple payments per invoice. And the only one that supported it was Square. And Square is really, really advanced.

[00:35:34] We love Square. We all evaluated Stripe. We didn't want to use QuickBooks because QuickBooks doesn't support it as well. And Square was the way to go. I don't know if others support this feature today, but Square definitely supports it. So I'll leave it right now so I can, I can also change it to single payment.

[00:35:51] Or 50 percent deposit. Let's just keep it as 50 percent deposit. And now let's generate the invoice.[00:36:00] 

[00:36:04] Give it a second. I hope that the gods of the demo are not going to mess with me. And now one thing that we said we didn't want to do. We didn't want to replicate all the square features. as part of the extension. So just let me make sure that I'm inside the Square. Yes, I am inside. So a lot of features that Square supports, we didn't integrate into the extension and we allowed them to continue and edit the invoice on Square.

[00:36:31] So for example, I can actually split the balance into up to 12 payments. And how do I do this? I just click on edit invoice in the Square dashboard. I'm immediately logged into square and here I can go into and as you can see, light items, everything has been created. I can actually, wait a second. I'm [00:37:00] sorry. So I can add a payment schedule here. And as you can see, I can request as a pot. I'm sorry. You know what? Made a mistake in the demo, but never mind. I can actually request a deposit and I can put a 50 percent here. And once I do this and I save and I save his draft, I can go back here and I can actually see that the invoice has been split into deposit and balance.

[00:37:27] I support within the extension to split into deposit and balance. But again, I could actually in the square dashboard. I can actually split the balance into 12 more payments, which I'm not going to go into right now due to lack of time. Now I can create the invoice. Now the invoice is still in draft mode.

[00:37:43] I can create the invoice.

[00:37:47] And once I create the invoice, I can actually look at the invoice payment page. And as you can see here, I have a ship different shipping address as that I ordered. And, [00:38:00] the shipping address that they specified in the invoice. And now let's just do a payment.

[00:38:18] And you will see that once I paid it, the payment is automatically reflected in the transactions table, and you can see that the payment schedule has been updated. Okay, so that's one fee. Another feature that automatically since all payments back now, his use case was also that, sometimes he gets payments via wire transfers or check and this is not coming to scare.

[00:38:47] So, you know, he, he needed an option to basically the ability to record external permit payments. and also sink it back into our table. So we also did this by integrating with the square [00:39:00] dashboard so you can go into that. You can click on that payment from within the extension. The square dashboard opens up again.

[00:39:10] And as you can see here, I can basically add a payment, say that I'm recording a payment. The payment should be a wire transfer. I'm clicking other confirm

[00:39:26] going back into easy invoice. And as you can see, the payment has been sent back into our table as well. And then you see that the order is fully paid. And if I click on view again, this is an air table feature. I can see that the square payment node is the wire. We actually also save all the Jason for reference into the scale payment object.

[00:39:48] So if in the future it wants to do stuff with it, you can. So that's the basic questions before I continue for another part. If I have time, 

[00:39:59] Kamille Parks: not a [00:40:00] question, just I like the sort of accordions that are on the extensions designed to expand the line items and payment schedule section. That seems pretty smooth.

[00:40:11] Yeah. And they are, they are not default, like UI elements that you're given with the air table extension library. So 

[00:40:21] Ronen Babayoff: no, yeah, no, no, no. We actually, yeah, that's one of the things we decided with all of our products, because we also develop for other platforms. We decided that we're going to develop with and design.

[00:40:32] It's a component library that came out of Alibaba. Yeah. And we love it. It has so many advanced features, and we actually created a really advanced framework on top of Undesign together with MobX that basically everything is reactive, as you can see, because we built a really advanced ErrTable specific framework on top of it.

[00:40:50] We don't even use ErrTable hooks, by the way, if you're a developer. So we're using kind of MobX with the ErrTable watchers, and it works perfectly for us in all [00:41:00] of our products. Do I still have time for another feature? Yeah, you got one more time. Okay, I have more time. So I want to show another feature, which is, you know, another use case.

[00:41:11] Let's say there is, there is another invoice that is already partially paid, as you can see, and let me just open it. And let's say that I made a mistake. I, I made a mistake. I overcharged for shipping, for example. Okay. So what I can do here, actually, I can cancel the invoice,

[00:41:34] and then I can change the shipping price. to let's say 800. Okay. And then I can generate the invoice again. But as you can see, Oh, what did I do here? Okay. I'm sorry. No, again, made a mistake.[00:42:00] 

[00:42:01] Let me start from scratch quickly. Sorry. Give me a second. I'll do it really quickly. Fields to clear before demos, Ronan, you didn't clear fields before demos. And let's start quickly again. Okay, I'm just going to quickly generate an invoice. It's going to be a 50 percent deposit.

[00:42:32] Okay, create it.

[00:42:38] Go to the invoice parent page, pay quickly.

[00:42:50] Okay, that's the part I should have done before. And now, as you can see, I already have one payment that was made, and the invoice is partially paid. [00:43:00] Okay, made a mistake, overcharged under chart for for something so I can cancel the invoice.

[00:43:11] I can change the transaction is still remembered in the table database and then I can generate a new invoice.

[00:43:24] Let's make it a single payment one this time because of those who already payment made.

[00:43:35] I'm going to create it quickly. And as you can see in the invoice payment page, I have a credit note. Of the invoice that they have a payment already made against the previous invoice of that specific order.

[00:43:54] And that's more or less it. So again, a lot of advanced features [00:44:00] that again, in order to, to, confirm with the use cases that the customer need. Awesome. 

[00:44:07] Dan Fellars: So your model typically is you find kind of a sponsor. Company that has a specific need for an app and they kind of sponsor the development of it.

[00:44:18] And then you, you have the ability to release it to the rest of the community. 

[00:44:22] Ronen Babayoff: Exactly. But this 1 has enough. That's 1 of the reason we wanted to showcase here. We are actually looking for more customers for this right now, because once we have additional customers, then we can actually look into putting it into the extensions marketplace.

[00:44:35] But again, until extensions are not supported in interface. It's kind of a something that I'm not sure that therefore it is worth it. But this is for like for not this is perfect for customers that need like an advanced invoicing solution with air tables. Please reach out to us. We can adapt it to your own specific use case.

[00:44:54] There is going to be an implementation fee initially and hopefully with few more customers we can. Yes. [00:45:00] 

[00:45:00] Dan Fellars: Yeah, 

[00:45:01] Ronen Babayoff: I actually, I, in general, I think that in general, like those types of products, I think that for us as developers and Dan, Camille, I'm sure you're going to agree, we're going to have to, until for now, start using the web apps API more and more because then we know, no, what if.

[00:45:20] Dan Fellars: Yeah, yeah, until they put it into interfaces. A lot of stuff just doesn't make sense. But I know you've got other apps. Why don't you? Yeah, I want to. I want 

[00:45:30] Ronen Babayoff: to share quickly about 2 other apps that we also built for customers. But now we also. We're about to launch them. Let me just share my screen again.

[00:45:40] Here it is. Yeah. So we have two, two apps that you can find on our website and you have the links here. One of them is smart clone. Smart clone allows you to easily recreate an entire project from a, from a past project with hundreds of tasks in a matter of minutes with minimal edit required. It has really advanced.

[00:45:58] It has, it [00:46:00] adapts to a data anchor of the project. It adapts to the duration of the project. And a lot of really advanced features. It's perfect for repetitive or similar type projects like annual events, seasonal campaigns and asset generation projects of the same type. We actually think it's better than record.

[00:46:16] We don't, we don't think, we know it's better than record templates, even with the data anchor that they added these days to record templates, because this is actually from completed. This is, this is cloning a completed past project, which is the best representation of Of the of the project of repetitive project.

[00:46:34] So that's one thing that is coming soon to the extensions marketplace and we're looking for better testers. So please reach out to us. You can back with them. Book a demo of smart phone on our website. We'd love to have as many better testers as possible. for now. And then another feature product is the air table to block connector.

[00:46:53] There is the air table labs one, but ours is production ready, much more advanced and the only one that supports all of our tables, [00:47:00] many too many relationships types, like multiple in record fields and multiple user fields. And if you need advanced to blow reports, we even have a tableau visionary Hall of Famer on our team.

[00:47:10] And I can tell you that even themselves told that after looking at this and that they would recommend ours to their customers. So those are the two things that I wanted to, that I hope I'm going to have the opportunity in a future podcast to demo. And you know, if you're interested in finding more about our easy invoices and our other products and services, this is the contact info.

[00:47:34] You can DM, DM Richard or myself on the Built on Air Slack community, email us. And that's it, I think. Awesome. 

[00:47:43] Dan Fellars: Yeah, I love it. I'm a fan of, of apps and Ronan and, and what you've got going on. So hopefully, hopefully there's more support from Airtable. I think is what we all would hope to see in the app development world.

[00:47:58] Ronen Babayoff: Yeah, that, that's the premise on [00:48:00] which I. Founded easy apps apps on top of our table that work directly with their table data to make life easier for customers. And yeah, but again, we also are table builders. We're doing it really good as well. 

[00:48:12] Kamille Parks: And what amazing foresight to call yourselves easy apps. When at the time they were called blocks and then became extensions and then became apps three steps ahead.

[00:48:23] Ronen Babayoff: Yeah, actually it's where we started the super blocks. Oh, that's right. Oh 

[00:48:28] Dan Fellars: yeah. That's super blocks. Then I take it back. The other way though, it went blocks, apps, now extensions. Now extensions. 

[00:48:35] Ronen Babayoff: Yeah. 

[00:48:36] Kamille Parks: Wow. Okay. 

[00:48:38] Ronen Babayoff: But you know, these, the apps, we always say these apps, we take it easy and we make it one life easy for our customers.

[00:48:46] Dan Fellars: Very cool. Thank you, Ronan, reach out if that makes sense for you. Okay. Quickly 

[00:48:52] BUILTONAIR AIRTABLE COMMUNITY - 00:48:52 join our community built on air. com slash join, gets you into our Slack community of thousands [00:49:00] of air table users and fans very active daily conversations. So if you are not in there, join us at built on air. com slash join.

[00:49:10] AUDIENCE QUESTIONS WITH KAMILLE PARKS - 00:49:12 And with that, we'll end with Camille answering a community question. Share your screen. There you go. 

[00:49:20] Kamille Parks: So this came in through the Airtable community forum. Pull data by default from another table once a record is created. And we see a lot of these questions that are phrased somewhat similarly, and they could go either way in terms of what The user is actually asking for, and how to have it work in air table with the most minimal amount of effort that works on the most amount of plans.

[00:49:51] And so, if I'm understanding this particular person's, website, use case, they have three tables, [00:50:00] project, budget, and products. Budget is linked to both project and products. And it sounds like what they want is whenever there's a new project created, create the necessary budget records. So I have interpreted that ask into projects budget.

[00:50:19] Products where each budget item is linked to one project and one product. So in this case, we have six different products that are all effectively linked to the same project, but as individual line item records. And then another ask from the post is that to only include items that are active versus inactive.

[00:50:46] So I have a simple status field with only two options. And what is the best way to automate creating budget records whenever there is a new project. So before I get started, I want [00:51:00] to make a few of these inactive. To sort of demonstrate the automated component of this, I'm just going to create a new project, and then sit in this table and wait a little bit for it to create the new product, or budget records, I should say.

[00:51:20] So, in this case, there are fewer ones that were created than previously, because I made that adjustment to make some of the other products marked as inactive. Well, how did I do it? I went to my automations. And I have it set where a new project is created. Go ahead and find records in the products table where the status is active.

[00:51:47] And then I have a repeating action step. We're a repeating action group that's based on that list of records, and then for each of those records, I'm linking to both the current [00:52:00] item in the list that I'm iterating through, as well as the original project that was created. So we've talked about on this show before all of the different triggers for automations and when a record is created is.

[00:52:13] Often not the best trigger, just because a lot of times people are wanting to incorporate information from that record into the automation in some way, but based on how it was phrased in the original Question. It didn't sound like there was any particular information that was needed about the project, just that it exists.

[00:52:37] So that's why I went forward with just when a new record is created. All I need is the record ID, which is, of course, created automatically as soon as the record exists and then. The find record step again. We've talked about it before on the show. The find record step has a maximum limit of 100 records.

[00:52:57] So if it's the case that [00:53:00] you have more than 100 active products, this solution isn't going to work for you because it's going to hit that 100 and then stop. So if you had 150, 50 products aren't going to be linked.

[00:53:17] The other thing that you could do to get around that limit, you could have a script run to output the list of matching records, but you can't have a script on the lowest plan this This base right now is on a free tier workspace, so it's not going to help you if you have more than 100 products and you're on the free plan.

[00:53:46] So I believe that was all that was requested but I have the second automation in here. That interpreted the question a little bit differently. At first, I read it [00:54:00] that when a new project was created, create one budget item that was linked to all of the different products that were marked as active.

[00:54:10] So rather than this being broken into six records, it'd be one record, it'd be one record. Links to six products. That's actually far easier to do. The structure is largely the same. It's actually all the same steps, except there's no repeating action. You would have that same problem with if you had more than 100 active products, it would stop at 100.

[00:54:33] But you would be able to just insert the list of record ID into products.

[00:54:42] Dan Fellars: Awesome. Very, very good solution. 

[00:54:46] Ronen Babayoff: I cannot just say that SmartClone may also solve the problem. I'm not sure. I need to dig into more, but I recommend reaching out as well. Maybe. 

[00:54:55] Kamille Parks: Sure, because it seems like a just reading from the question, [00:55:00] it seemed like a pretty, with every new project, there wasn't any qualifiers that they had put on it, like, when the project is of this type, or when it gets to this stage, or when the, project manager is Camille.

[00:55:15] It was just when a new one is created. And so, just automatically creating those budget records, which is a fairly common use case, not necessarily with budgets, but when a new record is created here, Create the relevant records in this other table. So hopefully this, general structure is useful to people.

[00:55:42] But I do want to call out the, the a hundred limit. It might run in to some issues. I'll just say, because you can't, the only way that I typically get around it is to write a script.

[00:55:58] Dan Fellars: Very good. [00:56:00] Awesome. That, concludes our show. So I want to thank Ronan for coming on. Ronan, next time you come. We'll do it in person in your location. That's enticing that backdrop. I'll 

[00:56:16] Ronen Babayoff: hold you to it. 

[00:56:18] Dan Fellars: Yeah, very good. Thanks for coming on and check them out. Easy apps. hq. com is where you can find Ronan and all his apps and teams.

[00:56:26] So thank you and Camille and we will see everybody next week on next week's show. Take care. Thanks. Thanks for having me.

[00:56:37] OUTRO - 00:56:37

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