Automate Custom Certificates using Airtable and Documint 🪄

We just created a new Airtable course to teach teams how to use Airtable. One of the things that was requested from our beta testing group was for some sort of certification at the end of the course. So naturally we knew we'd need to create an automated process for this!

Thanks to a little help from our friends at Documint, we were able to put our template together to produce a nice one-page PDF with the student name and date of completion. However, the automation to create and send this newly minted (see what I did there? 😉) document was a bit of work.

The initial problem I ran into was the need for a delay in the automation. Creating the document was simple enough, but when I tried to send the document immediately the automation would fail. After some trial and error, I realized this was because the document didn't have enough time to fully load into Airtable. I needed to wait just a minute to give it time to fully upload.

But unfortunately, there isn't an action in Airtable that allows us to delay within an automation!

So naturally, I set out to create a workaround! I built a formula in Airtable that would only output a desired message after waiting two minutes... this was perfect! Now I could create a second automation that only triggered after the delay was complete.

Check it out in this two automation solution! Plus, when you're ready to master the fundamentals of automation (and start saving massive amounts of your time) check out my free automation training here! 👇