Business Expense Tracking
Airtable has a feature that allows you to drop attachments into a cell. As a veteran spreadsheet user, this is pretty earthshaking. It means that we can now combine the power of filter, sorting, and data visualization with file management. Expense tracking is the first thing I thought of when I discovered the ability to store attachments, but there are a number of amazing use cases, like social media planners and podcast/video editor libraries.
To build a business expense tracker, you need a table for all of the people who might make purchases - "Purchasers." This table calculates how much each person is owed, and how much they've been paid in reimbursements. The next table, "Expenses," is where you enter all of the transactions. For employees to enter their purchases themselves, you can use a form view, like I have in the below example. Next create a table, "Reimbursement Checks," which is used to enter any payments made to reimburse the purchasers if they buy things with their own money. That's it! It's very simple. The most tricky part is to enter the calculations in the "Purchasers" table to show total owed to each purchaser, total spent with personal funds, and total reimbursements. These are done using "rollup" field types. You can read more about rollups here.
Thanks for reading! Copy the base by clicking "Copy Base" in the bottom right corner of the embedded example, or visit the base in Airtable Universe here. If you found this useful, you might also like using the Mileage Reimbursements base.
