In the COUNTIFs thread from a few days ago, Vasken Bakalian posted a video showing linking records within an app but stated that it was not a good practice. I want to stress that I respect and appreciate his participation and advice here, but I would argue that linking records within an app can be not only good practice but an opportunity to leverage the RDB structure information in a way that increases productivity and reduces error. In my experience working through how to fit my business requirements into SmartSuite's structure, I could find no better option than to link records within an app to get the functionality I needed.
For my use case (small residential design-build company), the bottleneck that all projects must pass through is the go/no-go project price. While the templates for construction have been helpful to me in understanding how to best structure my data business-wide, all but one of the templates presume that cost information is something to be compiled from subcontractor bids. We do a substantial amount of the project work ourselves, and the more unique a customer's ideas are the more granularity we need to get our pricing right. Usually, this results in a lot of iterative mathematics to be done before a project is greenlit, but that numerical information is also closely coupled with time and resource information that can preclude certain choices as the price is developed. The entire reason I am moving over to SmartSuite is that this information can "travel" with the cost and pricing information at the item level in a way that has proven difficult to implement with spreadsheets or our current platform SmartSheet.
The structure I have landed on is to use a "Quotes" app that can get me cost and pricing information at three levels of granularity while still carrying time and resource data. The records in this app are assigned several characteristics using dropdowns:
DIVision (Site, Framing, Plumbing, etc.)
CATegory (Labor, Material, Subcontractor, etc.)
TYPe (Base bid, allowance, option #, etc.)
LOCation (Room)
RECord TYPe (Item, Project Total, or Division Total)
Project Total and Division Total records within the Quotes app are summed from items (and spotlit for clarity) using formula "helper" fields to roll up various numerical Item fields. These fields are named with a "z-" prefix and are left invisible in all but one view.
At this point, I agree that I could use another app to summarize records using any of the field values I've created. One of the reasons I don't is that I can use views to group Items by Division and Category, and by doing so I can click the "+" to add new Items and the dropdown selections and links autopoulate with the correct values. This allows me to build out a quote very quickly without allocation error and without ever leaving the app. This method is the most effective one I have used to prevent these errors and also allows me to build a quote using whichever combination of grouping and filtering gives me the best result. The second reason I summarize within the same app is that it allows me to instantly know where I am with cost and pricing without leaving the app, again by using views with filtering that would not be possible across apps.
Pricing data is then linked out of the Quotes app as Division Totals and a Project Total for presentation to the customer for approval. The other characteristics are used for internal tracking, material lists, allowance report, etc.
Ultimately, the investment I have made so far in building out SmartSuite to function first as a rudimentary spreadsheet and then, after project approval, as a data base for project management has been worthwhile. My purpose for writing this post is to let other users know my experience in linking records within an app, and also to let SmartSuite know that if subtasks are ever modified where they can rollup data to the parent task with the linking done in the background I will laugh and cry at the same time.
Any questions, comments, or corrections are invited and appreciated.
Mike