How to Automatically Generate Employee Attendance Records for Workshops in Airtable

You have three tables in Airtable.

One is a Business table that stores company level details. Another is an Employees table that stores employee details and includes a linked record field to the Business table.

The third table is a Workshops table. It stores the workshop name, date, and other details, and includes a linked record field to the Business table showing which businesses have registered.

Each workshop is linked to the businesses that have signed up. Each employee is linked to the business they belong to.

Now you want to track attendance.

Every time a business signs up for a workshop, all of its employees attend that workshop. You want an attendance record for every employee for every workshop their business has registered for.

Doing this manually does not scale. So how do you automatically generate these attendance records?

Create the Attendance table

Now create a new table called Attendance. This table represents one employee attending one workshop.

Add a linked record field to the Workshops table. Add another linked record field to the Employees table.

These two fields define what each attendance record is for. You can also add lookup fields such as workshop date or business name if needed.

For the primary field, use a formula or a concatenation of the workshop name and the employee name.

Add a checkbox or status field. This is where you mark whether the employee attended or not.

Go back to the Workshops table and add a checkbox field called Generate attendance records.

This field controls when attendance records should be created. You will manually check this box once registrations are finalized for a workshop.

Build the Automation

Create a new automation. Set the trigger to when the Generate attendance records checkbox is checked.

In that workshop record, you already know which businesses have registered through the linked Businesses field. From those businesses, you can access all related employees using a rollup or lookup field that pulls employees through the Business table.

Next, add a repeating group. Set the repeat list to the list of employees linked to this workshop through the registered businesses.

Inside the repeating group, create a record in the Attendance table. Set the Workshop field to the triggering workshop record. Set the Employee field to the current employee from the repeat step.

This creates one attendance record per employee for that workshop.

From here, tracking attendance becomes easy. You can mark attendance, calculate totals, and build reports without manual data entry.