🌎 Overview
🛠 The Build - X Steps
Core Functionality
1. Create an Airtable Base
2. Create a Request Form
3. Create an Approvals Table
4. Create an Approval Form
5. Email the Approver
6. Notify the Requester when Approved/Denied
💪 Additional Functionality
📚 More Resources

🌎 Overview

Occasionally a third-party needs to approve something
You don't want to onboard them to your regular approval pipeline, so you just send them an email
Automate the process with this workflow

Difficulty: Intermediate

Cost: Free

Tools Used: Airtable

Templates: Airtable link

🛠 The Build - X Steps

Core Functionality

Automatically send approval emails when a new request is received
Notify requester of response from approver
Set up automated follow-on actions

1. Create an Airtable Base

In Airtable, create a new base from scratch with records for each of the items/files that will be a factor in the approval decision

If files are used, create an additional field for each file field to retrieve the URL of the file. The formula used to retrieve the URL from a file is as follows:

RIGHT(LEFT({File}, LEN({File}) - 1), LEN(LEFT({File}, LEN({File}) - 1)) - SEARCH("https://", {File}) + 1)

2. Create a Request Form

Create a form to capture all the necessary details
Provide narrative explanations to simplify the process for the user

3. Create an Approvals Table

Create a new Approvals table with the following fields:

Request ID
Response
Explanation

4. Create an Approval Form

Create a new approval form view

5. Email the Approver

Create an "Automation" to send an email when a new record is created

Design an email to include all the necessary bits in order to make the approval decision
At the end, include a link to the approval form
Using a prefill URL parameter, prefill the request ID via the URL

When the link is clicked to open the form, the ID of the original request will be prefilled into the approval form

6. Notify the Requester when Approved/Denied

Create a second "Automation", triggering when a new record is created in the Approvals table

Add an action to find the original request record

Add an action to send an email to the requester

💪 Additional Functionality

‣

Associate requests & approvals with people, with Airtable

Create a new People table with the following fields:

Name
Email
Manager - This is a 'Link to another record' field that references the People table itself
Manager Email - This is a 'Lookup' field that references the Manager field, and pulls the Email associated with that person.

In the Requests table, add a new field that is a 'Link to another record' field pointing to People

Add this new field to your request form. This forces the user to indicate who they are when making a request.

Add another field to the Requests table called Manager Email. This pulls the email address of the manager of the requester.

In your 'Send Email to Approver' automation, replace the recipient of the email with the Manager Email from the request.

‣

Send email reminders with Airtable

To determine whether a request has been responded to yet, add a new checkbox field to the Requests table

Update your 'Notify Requester' automation to add a new action, marking the request Response Received box checked when a request is approved or denied

Create a new automation 'Send Reminders'

Set the trigger to be a recurrence of your choosing
Set the first action to be 'Find Records' in the Requests table that don't have the Response Received box checked
Set the second action to send an email similar to the original request email, asking them to approve or deny

‣

Add approval items from upstream systems with Zapier

In addition to collecting requests from an Airtable form, they can be created by adding a record with a third-party tool like Zapier
In Zapier, create a Zap:

Set the trigger to another app of your choosing
Set the action to add a new request to your Requests table
The rest of the Airtable workflow will kick off from there

‣

Pull different types of approvals into a single pipeline with Airtable

In addition to collecting requests from your base Airtable form, this framwork can be used to collect different types of approval workflows
For each additional use-case, add new fields to your Requests table to capture different types of items
Create a new form for each of these request types, only showing the relevant fields for that request type
Add these new fields to the request email automation that is sent to the approver

‣

Trigger downstream automations with Zapier

When an approval or denial is submitted, you can trigger downstream actions via any third-party app that integrates with Zapier
In Zapier, create a Zap with the trigger "New Record in Airtable"
Then set up additional subsequent action steps in your Zap

‣

Notify someone of a submission via Email with Airtable

Create an Automation in Airtable with the following steps:

Triggered by a new record in the Approvals table
Use the "Send an Email" action in Airtable to send a custom email

📚 More Resources

A 15 minute video walkthrough of this build is available in the rlz.io community
If you haven't used Airtable before, signing up via this link gets me a $10 Airtable credit 🙏

#003 An approval workflow