Best Way to Automate Inventory Tracking in Airtable

You’re currently using Airtable to manage your product inventory, but you’re looking for a more efficient way to keep it updated.

Ideally, you want to update inventory simply by scanning a barcode, rather than manually searching for a product by its serial number.

This is because many of your items look alike, so finding the correct one often requires manually entering or searching for the serial number. This happens every time stock is updated, which is a huge waste of time.

Your goal is to set up an automation where, when you scan the barcode of an item (like chocolate, kettle corn, Pokémon cards, etc.), the item count is automatically increased or decreased depending on whether you’re adding stock or recording a sale.

What’s the best way to set this up in Airtable?

Airtable offers a Barcode field type that lets you scan barcodes or QR codes using the camera on your iOS or Android device. To use this feature, you’ll need the Airtable mobile app—it does not work in the web app.

This barcode field makes it much faster to find and update records. For example, when updating stock in the Airtable mobile app, you can tap the search bar and then the barcode icon to scan a product. The matching record appears instantly, and you can then manually update the product fields.

However, this process is currently entirely manual.

Barcode fields are not supported in Airtable forms, so you can’t trigger automations or update fields automatically based on a scanned barcode. The only way to use it is by manually searching for the product through a scan and then updating the fields yourself.

Based on my research, there are currently no third-party apps that allow you to automate field updates through barcode scanning. All updates must be done manually after the scan.