In the previous post in this series, we concluded by recognizing several interactions our stakeholders need to undertake with our accounting. In this post, we’ll use their interactions to derive criteria for finding an appropriate IT solution for providing an accounting. We’ll see that neither simple, fast, and cheap spreadsheets nor standard databases (without extensive customization) are fully satisfactory. We conclude that the SaaS product AirTable provides the right mix of power with accessibility. As a warning, several product- or technical-workflows are demonstrated in the next few paragraphs. This is for those who desire extra assistance in understanding the workflow overhead occasioned by a spreadsheet or the PostgreSQL database system.

In the previous post, we saw that spreadsheets and databases are insufficient for rendering proper accountings that will make our internal and external stakeholders effective. Spreadsheets have an accessible UI, but a poorly-structured model for managing data. Databases have a solidly-structured model for managing data, but their interfaces are inaccessible outside of a class of technical cognoscenti. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how AirTable provides a middle path. Kathy Sierra once said that when your tool sucks, people say “This tool sucks.” When the tool is great, people say “I’m so awesome with this thing.” AirTable makes me think I’m very awesome indeed.

At the beginning of this document, I proposed that an accounting lets curriculum managers organize their teams, express logical dependence of learning goals and operate more effectively. I’ll give a brief taste of how AirTable helps us do exactly this at Flatiron Schol. Map Products to Learning Goals Airtable’s UI features a “stacking” user interface. Thus you can navigate from Learning Goals to the Product (a collection of two intermediate macro objects, Lessons and “Bricks”) and vice versa. Here we are going from macro-level to the micro: Demonstration of tunneling through an AirTable-stored accounting macro-to-atomic Here we see a Brick, “Recognizing and Processing Nested Data Structures to Insight” that is one of several comprising the Product “Prework.

Here are some bits of advice that I think will help anyone trying to model complex information systems in AirTable. Pursue Referential Integrity Like You’re Building a Database Referential integrity is a powerful concept. You should build your “base” as if it were a database in Postgres, Oracle or similar. You want your records to live in one place only. If you need to get their data, do not duplicate it. Built a series of associated records and lookups. AirTable lookup fields can go one “leap” so, occasionally, you might wind up doing something that feels a little…hack-y. Nevertheless, hacks can get improved but dirty, duplicate data denies deletion decidedly.