You have an Orders table with a multi-select field called Tags.
The Tags field contains options such as Priority, Shipped, and Awaiting Payment.
When an order is waiting for payment, your team adds the Awaiting Payment tag. Once the customer pays, they remove it.
Now you want an automation to run specifically when Awaiting Payment is removed.
Airtable can trigger an automation whenever the Tags field changes, but that only tells you that something changed. It doesn't tell you whether the specific tag you care about was added or removed.
I would solve this with a simple formula field.
Create a formula that checks for the tag
Add a Formula field to the Orders table called Awaiting Payment.
Use this formula:
IF(FIND("Awaiting Payment", {Tags}), "Yes", "No")
The formula returns Yes while the Tags field contains Awaiting Payment and No when it doesn't.
So if the Tags field changes from Priority, Awaiting Payment to just Priority, the formula automatically changes from Yes to No.
You now have a field that Airtable can use to determine whether that specific tag is currently present.
Trigger the automation when the tag is removed
Create an automation using When record matches conditions as the trigger.
Set the condition so Awaiting Payment = No.
Airtable's When record matches conditions trigger works when a record changes from not matching your condition to matching it.
In this example, the record starts with Awaiting Payment set to Yes. When your team removes the Awaiting Payment tag, the formula changes to No.
The record now matches the automation condition, so the automation runs.
You can then send an email, create a note, post a Slack message, or run whatever action you need.
What if you want to detect when the tag is added?
You can use the same formula.
Instead of triggering when Awaiting Payment = No, set the automation condition to Awaiting Payment = Yes.
When someone adds the Awaiting Payment tag, the formula changes from No to Yes and the record enters the matching state.
The automation then runs.
Why not use When record updated?
You could use When record updated and watch the Tags field. Airtable allows you to choose specific fields for this trigger, so the automation would run whenever Tags changes.
The problem is that Tags could change for many reasons.
Someone could add Priority, remove Shipped, or change another option without touching Awaiting Payment.
If your automation only cares about one specific option, the formula gives you a much cleaner condition to work with.
For this type of workflow, I would use the formula to convert the multi-select into a simple Yes or No state and let When record matches conditions detect when that state changes.