Data management in a family business

Choosing the tool

Three years ago, we migrated from a set of loose Excel spreadsheets to Airtable. The main issue we wanted to solve was how difficult it was to keep track of outstanding invoices. The spreadsheet my father used was a simple list of invoices where he deleted the ones that had already been paid. Errors between what had been collected and what was still pending were frequent, not to mention the fact that it was impossible to keep any kind of history or analyse income data.

One day, during a back-and-forth about unpaid invoices with a property management company, they sent us an email via Airtable with our invoice history. I had already been thinking for some time about building something around databases, and Airtable turned out to be an excellent alternative: it combined a database-like system with a friendly, easy-to-use UX/UI. In a way, Airtable found us.

The system

The first base we created was Cobranzas (Payments). We started with two fundamental tables: Consorcios, which represents the buildings we work in, and Administraciones, which manage those buildings and pay the invoices. These two tables are shared across all the bases we use.

Finally, the Cobranzas table is where we manage the status of invoices. In a simple way, we can see how much we invoice per month and to whom. Payments management improved significantly. Different views help us find information more easily, such as Pending, Not sent, and Paid.

About a year later, I created the Trabajo (Work) base. This is the base we use on a daily basis. It consists of two tables: Trabajo and Empleados. The Empleados table stores data about employees and collaborators. The Trabajo table is where every service job is scheduled; each new row represents a new job.

This base also uses shared tables from Cobranzas. As before, we rely on views to organise the information. These include Agenda, a calendar view, and History, a table that we use—through grouping and filters—to manage jobs for each individual building. This base is also used to manage quotations and invoicing.

Two tables for invoicing? Yes, it’s not ideal, but for now Cobranzas only contains issued invoices, while Trabajo includes jobs that are yet to be invoiced, along with the corresponding invoice data.

The newest bases we have are Accounting and Finance. The Accounting base contains six tables: Suppliers, Invoicing, Banks, Income, Expenses, and Balance. This base allows us to manage bank and financial movements more effectively. Thanks to it, we started to clearly see the difference between what we invoice and what we actually collect, understand monthly cash flow, and keep a more detailed record of recurring expenses.

The Finance base, on the other hand, is used to schedule upcoming payments and will eventually be absorbed into Accounting.

Next steps

The bases have grown, although we are still far from reaching the limits of the Team plan. Currently, Cobranzas has around 6,300 rows and Trabajo about 7,200. Accounting contains roughly 2,600 rows. In the Trabajo base, we have used 7 out of the 20 GB available for photos and videos of jobs.

While a large part of our workflow has improved, there are still several manual processes that take time.

Looking ahead to 2026, the goal is to improve and automate various processes. Some of the ideas I have in mind are:

• Improving how information from completed jobs is recorded through an internal application
• Separating quotations from the Jobs table
• Developing a stock system to manage spare parts
• Automating job intake