Sure, start with a hard one.

There are four primary factors that influence how quickly I’m able to turn around a new Base project.

1. How complex is the Base? A base that doesn’t need much modification and has well-defined objectives for the four custom views per table can usually be completed in 30 days or less. More complex projects take more time, and elements that involve a novel implementation (something I haven’t done before) can lead to delays until I can get “unstuck” on the problem. Large amounts of data to import, or data that needs extensive “cleaning” after importing also slows things down.
2. How busy am I with my own travel agency business? I fully expect that there will be a moratorium on new projects during WAVE season, for example.
3. How well prepared are you, and how clear are you on what you want? I’m willing to iterate with you to get a Base that does what you need it to do. But the less I need to go back to you for clarifications, the faster you get back to me, and the clearer your goals are from the outset, the faster i can get the work accomplished.
4. What else is going on? I’m a dad, with 50% custody of two teenagers. (Which is really 100% custody, every other week).It’s not always the case, but generally speaking, when I have the kids I get less “extra” work done.

I understand that turnaround time is a important issue. Every development agreement includes development time frame targets, and discounts on final payment if deadlines are missed.

Well …… sort of. Slow down there a minute. Yes, you only pay me once. (Unless you want to hire me to come back and do more work customizing your Base or providing training later). But Fantastic Management Tool is built on the Airtable platform, which is a SaaS product. I have no control over their pricing. When last I checked (on February 10, 2025) their prices are:

• Team: $240/year per collaborator (or $24/month/collaborator if you pay monthly). This plan gets you: 50,000 records per base; 20GB of attachment storage per base; 1 year of revision and snapshot history; 100,000 API calls/month (can link with some external tools); Forms; Automations; Extensions; Interface Designer; Timeline & Gantt views; the ability to select colors; Record coloring; Calendar view
• Business: $540/year (or $54/month) per collaborator. The biggest differences at this level are up to 125,000 records per base, unlimited API calls, and 100GB of attachment storage per base.

The vast majority of agencies will be perfectly fine with a single collaborator on the Team plan. As a point of reference, my own base has been in use since 2016 and is currently still under 10,000 records – I’ve still got plenty of unused space on the Team Plan. The good news is that, the way that Fantastic Management Tool is designed to be used, you can usually get by with only one Airtable collaborator. Read-only data access and form input does not count as a “collaborator” in the Airtable system. If you want to enable some of the more advanced data control/restriction features, your Agents can add Free user accounts, and make use of data on a read-only basis/submitting forms without being account collaborators. The only time you might need to purchase additional licenses would be if you have a co-owner who needs to have 100% concurrent data access or you want to give an assistant access to your Base, and want to either limit their access or audit what they have done while in the Base.

For current pricing details, go to https://airtable.com/pricing

Maybe. In some ways. Not really so much when it comes to the way we’re using it in Fantastic Management Tool, BUT that could change. Airtable has made significant strides to become more automation-friendly, and they seem to roll out new automation functions pretty regularly.

To be blunt, when I started using Airtable, it had VERY limited interoperability available. Just about the only thing I could do is set it up to regularly export tables for backup to Google Sheets. The few things that I’ve WANTED to automate with Airtable turn out to be some of the most complex to make work. So I haven’t spent much time on automation. If you come up with a cool way to automate a function using Fantastic Management Tool in Airtable, I’d love to hear about it!

For me, coming up with a Commission Statement Template that I can pretty much just copy and paste into a document to print to .pdf and send to agents each month was downright magical. It saves me HOURS of work every single month. When I can do that with true automation, I might just need smelling salts (or something stronger) to be revived.

So far, it hasn’t been able to prevent tire kickers from wasting my time or indecisive people from making eleventeen changes after they book. But it’s not really fair to expect that of a Back Office tool now, is it?

There are a few things that Airtable (and by extension Fantastic Management Tool) is not great at. One is the automation issues mentioned in answer to a previous question. It is getting better, but it’s not really there yet. The other is that it can be maddeningly frustrating to try and print from. Solutions for printing Airtable reports that I’ve found have either been prohibitively expensive or more complicated than I could figure out (probably why they were expensive). I’ve managed to get by pretty well with a couple of workarounds.

First, I take a lot of screenshots. This is especially useful for capturing Dashboard views that show multiple charts and tables. Second is that I’ve leveraged the discovery I mentioned earlier about using copy & paste. Airtable cells copy and paste quite nicely into document tables. It’s still problematic for more than about 20 rows at a time. But even that can be worked around by copying and pasting to tables on multiple pages.

Are you looking at the “Sum” of a list of commissions due to an agent, and noticing that the amount your Base says is the total is off by a penny or two? Sorry about that. Eventually, I’ll figure out how to fix that. Here’s what’s happening. Commission amounts are math problems. They’re not terribly complex, but they’re often not particularly “clean” either. The mismatches you see (usually, they’re off by a couple of cents, at most), come from Airtable adding up numbers that are displayed for you as rounded to the nearest one-cent. But because they’re calculated amounts, Airtable automatic sum calculation is adding the actual calculated total, BEFORE rounding to the nearest one cent. Still confused? Let’s try an example.

• Assume Agent gets a commission share of 60%.
• Total commission received by the agency is $127.43
• Agent Share is 127.43 * .60 = $76.46 – that seems easy enough.
• EXCEPT, the Agent Share is REALLY $76.458. Airtable rounded up to the next cent.
• But when Airtable generates a SUM of what is due to an Agent, it adds the “real” numbers, without rounding to the nearest cent. It only applies the rounding rules after calculating the total. So commissions due to an Agent of $76.458 and $73.546 will generate a total due of $150.00. The “real” total is $150.004, but expressed as currency, it rounds the total to the nearest dollars and cents.
• Meanwhile the numbers you see as due for those individual commissions will be $76.46 and $73.55. Add them together, and you get $150.01.

You can drive yourself crazy trying to reconcile that one cent. Don’t do it. I think of that occasional one cent difference as akin to “The Angel’s Dram” that evaporates from a cask of whisky while it ages. We’re talking about tenths of one cent here. When I pay agents, I take the commission due for each booking from Airtable, and add those to get the total due to the agent for that payment cycle. I do it that way because that’s almost certainly the way the agents are calculating it, so the totals will meet their expectations, and “the math” makes sense. The column of individual commissions due will equal the bottom line total.

You’re an observant one, aren’t you?

Yes. The prices that I mentioned during that initial presentation where I first brought up offering to do this for other agencies were lower. At the time, I’d never taken my existing Base and changed things around to make it work for someone else’s business model. Now I have. In the process, I learned a few things:

1. it’s harder than I thought it would be. Part of the issue is that I built the original version seven years ago now. I don’t think I could tell you now how I figured out ways to make some of this work back then. So far, I’ve either been able to reverse-engineer to fix a problem or substitute a better method. But there’s really no such thing as being able to just hand over a blank template. It does a bit too much to be able to work that way.
2. You deserve more of my time and attention when I’m working on your project. I’m an inveterate insomniac, so I figured I could get a lot of this work done late at night. But it turns out that, when I’m doing this to meet someone else’s needs, sometimes I need to stop and wait for feedback that it does, indeed, meet their needs. Just because I’VE had my sleep removed, that doesn’t mean everyone has. (One free bonus custom data view for anyone who can correctly identify that reference).
3. I have less free time available than I thought I did. If I’m going to do this, do quality work, and not neglect my own travel business, I have to take fewer projects that pay a bit more.