Filter an Airtable Interface by Using User Groups

You are building an Airtable base that multiple departments in your organization need to access through an Interface.

Each department should only see the records they are allowed to see.

At first glance, the obvious solution is to build a separate interface for each department, each one filtered to show only that department’s records.

That approach works, but it does not scale.

You quickly end up maintaining several nearly identical interfaces. Any layout change, new field, or logic update has to be repeated everywhere. Over time, this becomes hard to manage.

What you actually want is a single interface that adapts automatically based on who is viewing it.

Filter based on user groups

You already know how to build a single interface that shows users only their own records. You do this by filtering where Created by is the current user.

Now you can do the same thing, but not for individuals. Instead, you do it for departments using user groups. User groups are available only on Business and Enterprise Scale plans.

So how do you filter an interface by user group instead of by individual user?

In fact, doing this is pretty easy.

In your table, create a User field and enable the option that allows multiple users.

Just like you can tag individual users in this field, you can also tag user groups. For every record, tag the group or groups that should have access to that record.

A record might be tagged with Finance only, or with both Finance and Operations, depending on who should see it.

Once that is done, move to the Interface and add a filter to the view. The filter should be set on your multiple user field. The condition should be has any of, and then you select the relevant user group.

In other words, this filter shows records where the user group field has any of the selected user groups.

That is it. You now have a single interface, and access is controlled entirely by the user group field on each record, so every department automatically sees only what they are supposed to see.