How to Integrate Airtable and ClickUp (Beginner Zapier Tutorial)

If you're somebody who's managing client projects inside a ClickUp, you know there's this kind of fuzzy period at the start of a project where everything needs to get set up. Prior to the project beginning. You probably are using a CRM or a spreadsheet or maybe emails to keep track of the relationship with the potential client. But then once they become a client, everything gets poured into ClickUp and you're ready to get started. That gray area in between the CRM sales phase and the actual doing the work phase is, is tricky and is one that often leads to a lot of manual work for teams who don't really know of a better way. In this video I'm going to demonstrate how we could take a client intake form or a client database of some kind and automate the creation of a project plan inside of ClickUp using a third party tool called zapier. Now, before we dive in, some quick disclaimers to get out of the way. We are going to be focusing today on the integration or ways we can connect Cloud ClickUp and airtable. I'm not going to be focused too much on explaining ClickUp or explaining Airtable. So if you're not familiar with those tools, either gloss over those sections or maybe explore those and then come back to this video later. We're going to be focusing the bulk of our time today on the workflow itself and how exactly we can automate it. And just like all of our other tutorials, please do use the chapters below this video to jump to certain sections. If you need to repeat anything. If you need to repeat anything or keep it for future reference, I think that's all the stuff I have to say at the beginning, other than a reminder to like and subscribe. So let's go into our workflow that we're going to automate today. So here is our flow that we're trying to get automated. First off, Client submits an intake form in airtable that creates some kind of entry inside of our basically our spreadsheet here. And what we want to do is have all of the project tasks for that new project be created automatically in our ClickUp. Now, as you might have guessed, this requires a little bit of translation, right? Airtable is one tool, ClickUp is another tool. How do we get these two things to talk to each other? Well, when it comes to any two pieces of cloud software, the first thing I would always look at is what integrations are available natively. So just a quick scan here of the ClickUp integrations page. You're going to find that unfortunately airtable is not on this page and vice versa on the airtable page. These integrations represent existing kind of like bridges between two pieces of software that because they're already set up, we can just drive our car along the bridge, no problem. Unfortunately though, as we see on this page, airtable and ClickUp do not have a native integration. There's nothing here on either side of the software stacks. What can we do? Are we done? Well, not really. We could have a human involved. We could have a human be the bridge between these two pieces of technology. When the human is notified that there's a new response in airtable, the human can then create the task tasks in ClickUp. But even though I do think this is an amazing way to get started for this so you can explore how that connection would work and make sure everything is dialed in long term, most people aren't interested in a human labor approach to solving a problem like this. And that's where our third party integration and automation options become quite handy. What we can do is Rather than having Airtable and ClickUp directly talk, we work through a third party connector which for this example we're going to use the tool called zapier. Now quick aside here, there are many different options out there for this kind of connector tool. Zapier, Integromat, now called make and Integrately are all common options. For this example though, we are going to be using zapier because it's the most beginner friendly I think, and they've recently enhanced their ClickUp integration that allows you to actually do a lot of the things that previously were just impossible to do via the limitations of this really simple tool. So you can replicate this setup with any tool that you choose. We'll have links for all of them below and you can learn more about my favorite tool by checking out this video up here. But all that to say we need some kind of third party middleman who can form a bridge between these two tools that don't otherwise talk to each other. Now, as simple as it is to just say Zapier as the connector here, this isn't quite as concrete as I might like. So I'm actually going to break this down into smaller chunks so we can know exactly how zapier is going to be our middleman. Ah, that is much better. So this is exactly how we're going to set up zapier. It's going to kind of give us some guidelines as to how this third party connector is going to work. We're going to make sure that the intake form happens in airtable. We're going to have Zapier on the prowl stalking Airtable to keep an eye out for when those changes happen. Then we're also going to have Zapier whisper down the alley to tell ClickUp that, hey, we've got something ready for you to work on. And ultimately that will create our tasks that inside ClickUp. Now, this is all great, right? Flowchart away, but how exactly do we do this? Well, when it comes to any automation like this, I always like to start off with an ingredients list. Think of it kind of like baking. Before you start throwing ingredients in the bowl, let's make sure we have all the ingredients and we don't have to go run to the grocery store. So our ingredients list for this kind of work today are these four things. First of all, we need an airtable database to collect client data. Now, if you already have a CRM, this is going to be an easy one to check, but otherwise we'll need to create one. For this example, I actually have a client database right here, which is just called Client Data Master File. It's basically a blank airtable base with one grid view. Not very fancy, but hey, it's there. The second ingredient we need is an airtable form to actually put that client data in. In this case, I don't have one yet. So I'm going to go ahead and create. I'm going to call it New Client Intake and I'm going to add some questions that will feed into the form that I have right here. This is what I'm going to use to actually input information and start off this automation once it's all created. So let's just preview. There we are. It's not pretty, but it is a new client intake form. Now, back to our ingredients list. Before we can start automating, we need to think with the end in mind. So we said at the very end of this project, all the way down here, wait, there it is. We want to have our project tasks in ClickUp. Well, ClickUp's not a mind reader, right? We need to tell ClickUp what are the project tasks. Now, I have a blank list in ClickUp right here. And I'm actually going to turn this into what will become my client service delivery template for. Let's just say, what do I want to be? Let's be a ClickUp consultant. How about that? Let's just pretend that's my business. All right, so I just whipped up real quick some tasks here. I could add due dates and all these other things that I might want to have, like dependencies. But for now, let's just say this is my list that I'm going to use for all of my ClickUp consulting clients, right? And to use this and to turn this into the ingredient I need for our project over here, I'm going to need to save this as a ClickUp template. And how do I do that? Well, quick refresher here. If you're not familiar, we're going to go to whatever level of the hierarchy our project is. In this case, for some reason, I have this as a list, so. So we'll just pretend that's appropriate. We're going to click on templates and we're going to click Save as template here. I'm going to name this template whatever I want it to be moving forward, and I'm going to make it private to me because this is just an example and I'll leave everything else as is. Now, because I have saved that template into ClickUp's template area, I will now be able to use that template to create new lists using that template. Hopefully. You know what I mean? If not, go check out this video about ClickUp templates. It should hopefully all make sense. But the important thing to know is we have now gathered our third ingredient here, which is a ClickUp template with our project tasks spelled out in it. Right now, this is super basic. I just want to say that for any of you who are choosing to automate this, you're probably going to want to make this a little bit more sophisticated. Otherwise it's hardly worth automating it because it's so simple. So anyway, there is that. The very last piece we need to do is to have something to glue all of this stuff together. And we already said manual labor is an option, right? We could have a human be the intermediary. And in fact, if you haven't watched this video, check it out. I actually recommend that for most people in most situations, using manual labor to glue it all together is a great way for you to make sure your database is working, your form is working, your ClickUp templates are working and have what you need. You've got that human oversight for at least a few repetitions. However, because this is an automation tutorial, I'm going to assume we've already graduated past manual labor. We don't need that because we've already done it. We know this works and we're just going to go ahead and build our automation. So with that, how do we do it now. Here is Zapier's website, and admittedly it's a little intimidating, I think, to look at. Basically what Zapier does is it makes these little landing pages for each tool it connects with and it's intended to show you all the different ways you can connect to the tool. And. And as you get more comfortable with Zapier, it may indeed tell you that. But I think in general, the thing that you want to look at on this page is down here under Triggers and Actions. Everything else on this page is just overwhelming examples that I don't know why they decide to show that to you. This is the stuff you really care about. We want to look at Triggers and actions available. Triggers means what is available in zapier to kick off an automation. What can it watch for? And Actions means what can Zapier do with airtable? What can it do to airtable? In this case, we're concerned with triggers because we know our automation that we're trying to design starts off and is triggered by airtable. So if Zapier doesn't let us do that, that would be pretty bad. So we want to start here first. In a quick check here, we can see that there is not a trigger for a form being submitted, but there's a trigger for a new record, which to me is pretty much what we're talking about. Whenever we create a new client on here, it will be creating a new record. So effectively those two things should be about the same. So we can go ahead and use new trigger as our start from here. We need to actually then create the automation. You can do that by just clicking on this and if you have an account, it'll flip you over to the Intake editing screen and if you don't have an account, it'll prompt you to create one. Ooh. And the link for the page I'm showing on the screen here is in the description below, as well as our affiliate link. If you want to try out Zapier for yourself. Everything I'm doing today is available on the free plan, so there's really no cost in using it. Might as well give it a shot. Now, once you either sign up for Zapier with our affiliate link or log into your existing account, you're going to see a page like this appear when you go to start a ZAP with the new record in airtable module. If for some reason you're not seeing it, you can also just click Create a new Zap from anywhere inside the interface and and choose airtable from the Top and you'll get to the same spot. As we talked about, we want the new record option here. Then we're going to click Continue. Then airtable is going to ask us to confirm which airtable account do we want to connect with. This is you telling Zapier that Zapier has your permission to basically be a stalker of your airtable account. Now, to make this happen, we're going to need to click Connect a new account, if you don't already have one. So we're going to connect a new account here, and it's going to ask you for your API key inside of airtable. So to find that API key, that connector that gives airtable permission to talk to Zapier or vice versa, we're going to go inside of airtable, click on our profile picture in the corner, and go into our account settings. That's up here. And then under Account, once inside account, you're going to see something like this. And here, right here is the airtable API key. This API key is what you're going to want to copy and paste into the prompt that Zapier just gave you. So this guy here, copy it and then paste that into the prompt that Zapier had pop up on your screen. Once you post that key in there, you can click yes, Continue, and it will process and connect Airtable and Zapier. So if we go back into Zapier over here, you'll see that airtable is now connected. Once you do that, you'll never have to do it again, you know, except unless something should happen. And this will be available for you here to select. So airtable should show up for you there. Next step, we're going to click Continue. Now, Zapier is going to ask you some questions about what exactly you want it to watch for. Zapier is a selective stalker, so you can tell it exactly where you want people to focus. For the first one, we're going to choose the base called Client Data, the example file I already showed you. Then we're going to choose the table where we have all of the responses that we created earlier. And then we also have the option to limit our trigger to be only for a certain view. You know, if you have things filtered down in some way. We're going to keep it all at the basics for now and move on. Finally, Zapier is going to ask us to test our trigger. This is a really cool feature of Zapier. It makes it super easy to use for anybody. Basically, we just click this button here and Zapier is going to push some fake data through and see if everything's working properly so far. So here we can see that. Yes, it caught some data. Great. We can continue on with the next phase. Now. What is the next phase? If we go back to our spreadsheet, let's scroll on down. We know that we want Zapier to tell ClickUp to create tasks, so let's do that. That is our second step in our zap. Over here we're going to look up ClickUp. Click up. There it is. We are going to choose Create List, which you can type in or scroll through. Continue. We're going to log in with ClickUp at that point and choose which workspaces we want to give Zapier access to. Then click Connect Workspaces. It'll load for a second and then we should see Zapier and ClickUp Connect. There it is. We're going to select our ClickUp account from the drop down and then click Continue. First up, what ClickUp workspace do we want this to create a list in? In this case, I'm going to choose my demo one. For which space? Just select wherever you'd like to have this list created. In this case, I'm going to choose this is a space. Do you want this to be inside a folder or do you want it to be floating? I'm going to say, sure, let's just keep it inside. No folder. I don't. I'll just let it float. Next up, do we want to use a template? So here we can choose. Do we want to have templated information come in? If we do a quick search here, we can actually see our ClickUp Consultant template that we just created. There it is. And we can now pull that in. Finally, we have the option to set a custom list name. And in this case, let's just pretend we want it to be, I don't know, the form of the ID or the name of the person. We could select that here. Notice right now when I click on these fields that this data comes in. This is showing me information that Zapier has picked up earlier on from Airtable. So if I click on created time, it's not going to put July 25, it'll put whatever time that form was actually submitted every time this zap happens. However, because airtable only did a test run, it's not showing all of my data. If you look in here, you'll see there's actually several columns in this database and they're not all showing up inside Zapier. So one thing I'm going to do just for the good of the order is, is I'm actually going to do a fake submission of the new client intake form to get Zapier seeing all of my information. So trust me on this one. We're going to do a quick test submission, and that'll help us finish the setup of our Zap. So company name. And I'm just going to fill in a bunch of this stuff. We'll fast forward through it. All right? And with that, we have created a new record inside our database. Why did I do this? Right? What was the point of this? Well, if I go back to Zapier, now that I have done a submission with Zapier and Airtable integrated, I can click load more and I can actually pull in a new record. There it is. Okay. Do you see it there? Record D. It took a second, but it's there. And if I pull that in now, it's pulling in my example data that I submitted, rather than Airtable and Zapier just trying to make up some fake robot data. Okay, this is more helpful to me now because down here, when I'm setting up my action for creating a list, I can now choose from that real data because I want my list name to be maybe the name of the person. Marge Space. Simpson Space. I'll do a bar and then the company name. This is all going to swap out dynamically with whatever is actually submitted each time. But by doing that one test submission, I made sure I could see it all here without having to just guess. So next up, I'm going to click continue. And finally, I'm going to click Test and Review. This is going to be a full test of all the stuff I just set up, including creating that list inside ClickUp using my template. All right, are we ready? Moment of truth here. Test and review. Spinning and spinning. We're hopeful here. We should see a confirmation once this actually goes through. Aha. Surely enough, a list was sent to ClickUp about one second ago, and this has been a little bit of a journey here with this integration. But alas, over here we should see inside client projects. If we refresh our screen, we should see our list be created, even though I don't currently see it. There it is. Okay, so they're both in there. MARGE SIMPSON Times 2. We've got our list templates in there. In this way, we've used Zapier to look at information submitted on the intake form and then load a template with that information as the task name. It's that simple. Okay, so we've just got this app to work through the trial experience. I also want to test it out one more time from scratch by actually inputting and creating a form just like client would. So we're going to click publish on this app, turn it on, and go actually submit an intake form entry to see if we can get the whole thing to work from start to finish. So we're going to keep this here, close this out, and we are going to go. Now that this is on, we're going to go submit a form. So let's go ahead, go to our new client intake form. All right, so we submitted the intake form. Now hopefully we're going to see Zapier do its magic in the background here. And we should see a list arrive inside of our ClickUp with those project details. So not seeing anything yet? Not seeing anything yet. We're going to refresh our page and hopefully it's going to show up there. This is just going to be our final test to make sure everything is working. Oh, come on. Click up. Let's go. Ah, there it is. Finally. Okay, so it took like, probably a solid five minutes here, but we now have our new list showing up here. Again, the name is proper, and all of our tasks did come in using the same exact zap we set up before. Now we've set up the basics here of putting in one intake form entry and having that trigger a task plan be created in ClickUp. We could, of course, though, we could expand this further, so some options of how to do that would be inside our zap. When we feel like tempting fate a little bit, we can choose to add some more conditions here. So right now we're we're creating the same project plan no matter what. But remember, on our intake form, we had all these different fields and it's possible, in fact, it's likely that the service a client selects is going to change what type of project plan we need to have set up. So as an expansion tip, we could actually go in and add some filters or conditions in Zapier to build different steps based on what service a client submitted. So we could say, hey, if they selected our ongoing bookkeeping service, load this task template. If we're looking to have someone as a retainer client, load this list template. We could have different paths based on what kind of client this is. If we wanted to do this path, we'd want to go back to our checklist and make sure we create a unique ClickUp template for each possible path so that's how you can build an integration of sorts between airtable and ClickUp by having a zap with use information. Whether it's just a task name or a whole lot of other stuff from airtable and put it into ClickUp. There is so much more you can do with this of expanding out custom task plans or custom embeds or certain personalized links, but at a basic level this is where you would start. If you want to check out any of the tools I mentioned in this video, check out the link in the description below. And if you want to learn more about how to turn ClickUp into that hub of your business operations, check out the link to our membership below. You can Inside the processdriven membership we cover this kind of stuff, but a lot more talking about how you can bring everything together and make ClickUp the hub of your workflow. So with that, thanks so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.