I'm going to verify a couple of current pricing/plan details before I commit numbers to your blueprint, since your budget is a hard line.Good — Airtable's free tier checks out for your case (up to 5 editors, 1,000 records, $0), so your $25 budget is safe with room to spare. That shapes everything below. Here's your blueprint. ## 1. Discovery **The real problem.** Your order information lives in two places that don't talk to each other — WhatsApp threads and paper notebooks — so no one on your team can answer "what did we order, from whom, and is it here yet?" without asking you or scrolling through chats. The tool's job isn't to be clever; it's to put every open supplier order in one shared place your three people can all see and trust, so the answer is always one glance away instead of one interruption away. **Weak or risky assumptions baked into the idea:** 1. *"I need a custom dashboard."* Honestly, you almost certainly don't. A custom-coded app for 3 people tracking orders is like buying a delivery truck to carry your groceries home. A no-code database tool does this completely, and you'll build it yourself in a weekend. I'd push back hard on anything more than that. 2. *"If I build it, the team will use it."* This is the assumption that quietly kills tools like this. WhatsApp wins because it's already open on everyone's phone. If your dashboard takes more taps to update than sending a message, people will drift back to WhatsApp and your dashboard becomes another stale notebook. Adoption, not building, is the hard part. 3. *"Order status fits into neat boxes."* Real supplier orders are messy — partial deliveries, backorders, "they said Tuesday but it's Friday." If your status options are too rigid, people won't know which box to tick and they'll stop ticking. Keep statuses few and forgiving. 4. *"Two weekends is the constraint."* You can build the thing in two weekends, yes. But whether it *works* is decided over the following month of daily use. Plan for a two-week "are we actually using this?" trial, not a launch-and-done. 5. *"Everything in the old notebooks needs to come across."* Tempting, but migrating months of history is busywork that delays the part that matters. Start with open orders only. **Must-haves (V1):** - One shared place all 3 people can open on a phone - Fields: supplier, what was ordered, date ordered, expected date, status, notes - A view that shows only open orders, and one that flags overdue ones - Dead-simple entry — adding an order takes under 30 seconds on a phone **Nice-to-haves (later):** - Automatic "this is overdue" alerts - Supplier contact info attached to each order - Photos of invoices/delivery notes - Spend totals per supplier - A read-only summary screen for at-a-glance status **Smallest valuable version (V1).** A single shared Airtable base with one Orders table, a quick-entry form, and two saved views — "Open orders" and "Overdue." Your team adds orders as they place them and changes the status as things move. It deliberately leaves out automated alerts, spend reporting, invoice photos, and any historical data migration — all of which sound useful but none of which are needed to retire the notebooks. ## 2. The Plan **In plain language.** Think of Airtable as a smart shared spreadsheet that also works beautifully as an app on your phone. You'll make one table where each row is one order. You fill in a few columns — who you ordered from, what, when, and a status dropdown. Then you create saved "views" that filter the same data different ways: one shows everything still open, another automatically surfaces anything past its expected date. Your team opens the Airtable app, sees the live picture, and taps to update status when a box arrives. No code, no servers, nothing to maintain. **Complexity: Simple.** It's one table and a couple of filtered views in a tool built exactly for this — the only real work is deciding your fields and getting the team into the habit. **What you'll need and why:** - **An Airtable account (free plan)** — this *is* your dashboard; free tier covers 3 editors and far more orders than you'll have open at once. - **The Airtable mobile app** (free, iOS/Android) — so the shop floor can update orders without a laptop. - **A decision on your status list** — the dropdown options that describe an order's journey (e.g. Ordered → Confirmed → Shipped → Arrived → Issue). Few and clear beats many and precise. - **A decision on supplier entry** — a fixed dropdown of your regular suppliers vs. free-typing the name each time. Dropdown is tidier; free-typing is faster to start. - **15 minutes with your two teammates** — to agree on the one rule that makes or breaks this: *we update the dashboard, not WhatsApp.* ## 3. Build Steps **Step 1 — Create the account and a blank base.** Sign up at airtable.com (free), create a new empty base, name it something obvious like "Supplier Orders." *Why it matters:* this is your foundation; everything lives in this one base. **Step 2 — Build the Orders table with your columns.** Rename the default table to "Orders" and set up these fields: Supplier, Item / description, Date ordered, Expected date, Status, Notes, and Placed by. *Why it matters:* these six or seven fields answer every question you currently chase across WhatsApp and notebooks. Resist adding more — every extra field is another thing someone has to fill in, and unfilled fields train people to ignore the tool. > **Fork — how to handle "Supplier":** > - *Single-select dropdown* of your known suppliers. Cleaner data, lets you group and filter by supplier later. Slightly more setup. > - *Plain text field* you type into. Zero setup, but typos ("Acme" vs "ACME Ltd") make grouping messy. > My honest lean for a 3-person shop with a stable supplier list: **dropdown.** You'll thank yourself when you want "all open orders from Acme." **Step 3 — Set up the Status field as a single-select dropdown.** Add status options as colored choices. *Why it matters:* color-coded status is the single most useful thing on the whole dashboard — your team reads the picture at a glance. > **Fork — how many statuses:** > - *Minimal (3):* Open / Arrived / Issue. Easiest to use, hardest to misfile. > - *Detailed (5):* Ordered / Confirmed / Shipped / Arrived / Issue. More insight into where things are, but more judgment calls. > Honest trade-off: detailed status is only worth it if knowing "shipped vs. confirmed" actually changes what you do. If it doesn't, start at 3 and add more only if you miss them. **Step 4 — Create the "Open orders" view.** Duplicate the default grid view, name it "Open orders," and filter it to *Status is not Arrived* (and not Issue, if you prefer). Optionally group by Supplier. *Why it matters:* this is the screen your team will live in — only the things that still need attention, nothing settled cluttering it up. **Step 5 — Create the "Overdue" view.** Another view filtered to *Expected date is before today* AND *Status is not Arrived*. *Why it matters:* this is the one that earns its keep — it surfaces the orders that have quietly slipped, which is exactly what falls through the cracks in WhatsApp today. **Step 6 — Create a quick-entry Form.** Airtable lets you generate a Form view that writes straight into the table. Include only the fields needed to log a new order. *Why it matters:* a form is faster and less intimidating on a phone than editing a spreadsheet, which lowers the friction that decides whether people actually log orders. **Step 7 — Invite your two teammates as editors.** Share the base with their emails, give them editor access, have them install the mobile app and sign in. *Why it matters:* shared visibility is the entire point; a dashboard only you can see is just a fancier notebook. **Step 8 — Seed it with today's real open orders, then run a two-week trial.** Enter only the orders currently open — not history. *Why it matters:* a tool with nothing in it feels pointless and a tool stuffed with old data feels like a chore; loading just live orders makes it immediately useful from day one. > **Optional Step 9 — Build an Interface (the "dashboard" view).** > Airtable's Interface Designer makes a clean, read-only summary screen — counts of open vs. overdue, a tidy list. Nice for an at-a-glance wall display or for you to check on your phone. *Honest take:* skip it for V1. The "Open orders" and "Overdue" views already do the job. Add this only once the team is reliably using the basics. ## 4. Polish **Errors and edge cases to handle:** - **Partial deliveries.** Half the order arrives, half doesn't. Decide a rule now: either keep status "Open" with a note, or split into two rows. Pick one and tell the team — ambiguity here is what makes status untrustworthy. - **Duplicate suppliers** (if you went with free-text). "Acme" / "acme" / "Acme Ltd" will fragment your data. The dropdown from Step 2 prevents this. - **Orders placed but not logged.** The tool can't track what nobody enters. This isn't a feature you can build around — it's a habit, addressed below. - **Someone marks something Arrived by mistake.** Airtable keeps record history, so it's recoverable, but agree that "Issue" exists as a safety valve for "something's wrong here." - **The 1,000-record limit.** On the free plan, each base caps at 1,000 orders total. At a few dozen orders a month you won't hit it for a year or two — and you can delete or archive old "Arrived" orders periodically to stay clear. Just know it's there. **Speed and ease of use:** - Keep the entry form to the fewest fields possible. Every field you cut makes logging faster and adoption likelier. - Make "Open orders" the default view that opens first. - Use big, clear status colors — readability on a phone in a busy shop matters more than elegance. **Failure points that commonly bite this kind of tool:** 1. **The team drifts back to WhatsApp.** The #1 killer. Counter it with one explicit team rule: order updates go in the dashboard, full stop. You model it relentlessly for the first two weeks. 2. **It becomes a second place to update, not a replacement.** If people log in WhatsApp *and* the dashboard, they'll resent it and quit. It has to *replace* the WhatsApp tracking, not sit alongside it. 3. **Over-building.** The moment you're tempted to add automations, spend charts, and supplier scorecards in week one — stop. That's the idea overcomplicating. Ship the simple version, earn the habit, add later. What this plan **can't guarantee:** that your team adopts it. The build is the easy 20%. The behavior change is the real 80%, and that's on the three of you, not the tool. ## 5. Launch & V2 **Going live (step by step):** 1. Finish Steps 1–8 above over your two weekends. 2. Hold a 15-minute kickoff with your two teammates. Show them the "Open orders" view, the form, and the mobile app. Agree out loud on the one rule: *we track orders here now, not in WhatsApp.* 3. Pick a start date. From that day, every new order gets logged here as it's placed. 4. For two weeks, you personally check daily that orders are being entered and statuses updated. Gently redirect anyone who falls back to WhatsApp. This fortnight decides everything. **Maintenance checklist:** - Weekly: glance at the "Overdue" view and chase what's slipped. - Monthly: delete or archive "Arrived" orders older than a couple of months to keep things tidy and stay under the record limit. - As needed: add a new supplier to the dropdown when you start using one. - That's it — there's nothing to update, patch, or pay a developer for. **Version 2 improvements, ordered by impact:** 1. **Overdue alerts (automation).** Auto-flag or send a daily digest of overdue orders so chasing doesn't depend on someone remembering to look. Highest impact — it makes the tool work *for* you. (Free plan allows 100 automation runs/month, plenty for this.) 2. **The Interface dashboard.** A clean read-only summary screen for at-a-glance status, good for a back-office display or quick phone checks. 3. **Invoice / delivery-note photos.** Attach a photo to each order so the paper trail lives with the record — kills the "where's that invoice" hunt. 4. **Spend per supplier.** Add an amount field and let Airtable total it, so you can see what you're spending where. 5. **Supplier contact card.** Phone/email per supplier attached to each order, so reordering or chasing is one tap. Do these one at a time, only after the basics have stuck. The discipline of adding slowly is what keeps this tool simple enough to actually survive. If you tell me your typical order volume and whether your supplier list is stable or always changing, I can lock in the two open decisions (dropdown vs. free-text, 3 vs. 5 statuses) and hand you the exact field setup to copy.