I design and build flexible database systems — in Airtable, not enterprise software — that run your scheduling, inventory, and customer operations automatically, tailored to how your business actually works.
I spent the last year building the full operations backbone — customer and order records, production scheduling, and inventory and cost tracking — for a fast-growing subscription-based business, from a blank base to a system that now runs the company's day-to-day automatically. Now I build that same kind of system for other businesses that don't want to pay for, or configure, a traditional CRM or ERP.
A new order, a signup, a seasonal plan — a trigger creates the record automatically. No manual data entry.
Linked tables capture how your items, customers, and resources actually relate to each other.
The system calculates what happens next and when — no one updates a calendar or spreadsheet by hand.
Every status change logs material use, cost, and inventory in real time, automatically.
A look at how the pattern applies in practice — including the exact table structure and formula logic behind it.
Northbound Ferments is a fictional small-batch kombucha producer, built here to demonstrate a pattern common to any recurring-revenue business with physical fulfillment. Their situation is a familiar one: brew dates, ferment timing, and ingredient orders tracked across spreadsheets and memory, with growth — a new subscription program layered on top of existing wholesale accounts — making it worse every month. No single place could answer "what's fermenting right now" or "how much ginger do we need to order next month."
A connected Airtable system tracks every batch automatically from brew day to shipment. A flavor library holds each recipe's timing and yield rules once. A single schedule table drives production across every brew cycle and sales channel. Two live formulas continuously answer where a batch physically is and what stage it's in — nobody updates a status field by hand, and both keep recalculating on their own every day.
The system covers every real-world variant a production business runs into, without special-casing any of them in the interface: standard fresh batches, batches that reuse an existing culture instead of starting from scratch, pre-bottled stock pulled to fill a rush order, and product sourced from an outside partner.
A spreadsheet that needed a manual update every time a batch moved stages. Ingredient orders made from memory. No single place to see what's actually happening in production. In its place: a system that updates itself — and a structure any small production or subscription business, from coffee to candles to meal kits, could run on with the same underlying design.
If your business runs on a workaround that used to make sense, I'll help you design a system that actually fits how you operate — without the enterprise-software price tag.
Email me — garrison.katie13@gmail.com