Advanced Automation Retrigger

Full Disclosure: this is a more advanced concept than I wouldn't normally address in my videos. If you are still getting comfortable with the software, you may opt to bookmark this post and come back to it later. There are a lot of moving parts here...

The problem is simple enough: Airtable Automations allow us to retrigger multiple times off the same record, but Zapier automations do not permit this. The way that Zapier works with Airtable is more simplistic: it watches an Airtable view for new records. When it finds a record, it triggers an automation. However, if that record leaves and then comes back it doesn't retrigger the zap - we effectively can't retrigger that automation for a second or third time. 🤔

But (of course!) there's a workaround. In fact, this limitation is specifically in the way that Zapier and Airtable "talk" - so we can go around this and use a free third party tool - Slack!

In this video, I outline how you can build an automation that retriggers each time conditions are met in Airtable. When the conditions are met, the record will get "reset" and timestamped. Then a message is sent to Slack in order to complete the remaining parts of the automation (send an invoice, send a text, etc.). Zapier is then used to find the corresponding data in Airtable and performs the more advanced automation. The end result? Retriggering a Zapier automation from Airtable!

Note: the initial idea of this work around came from our friends over at Frame.io - check them out to see the great ways they are putting Airtable to work!