How To Automate Project Health Reports With Airtable and Unito
Ever felt out of the loop? That’s a common complaint among stakeholders who are responsible for multiple projects. Too often, they’re chasing updates through multiple tools or scrolling through multiple reports. And that’s not to mention all the work that goes into constantly building those reports.
Keep everyone informed with less work by automating project health reports with Airtable and Unito.
Why automate project health reports?
Every project has its stakeholders, people with a vested interest in seeing it cross the finish line. But it’s a rare stakeholder who can dedicate all their time to a single project. They need a quick way to get updates on multiple projects at once, without going into the actual tools used to do the work.
Usually, a stakeholder will get regular reports to do this. But both creating and consuming these reports takes time and effort. In Unito’s Report on Reporting, more than a third of people surveyed said they spent at least three hours a week on reporting. With the right tools, you can automate that process, so everyone stays in the loop without the work.
Why use Unito and Airtable?
Airtable is one of the most flexible tools out there, and it can easily replace a dedicated spreadsheet tool, a work management platform, and more. That versatility means you could ultimately both run your projects and report on them from the same tool.
Unito is a no-code tool with the deepest two-way integrations on the market. You can build flows that automatically update information in multiple tools at once, in real-time. If you’re looking to keep your reports updated with any manual work, this is the tool to do it.
Building a project health report in Airtable
With Airtable, you can build any report you need and customize it to your needs. But we also built a ready-made template just for this use case. Here are the columns you’ll find in it.
- Date of Update: A date field that lets you sort through recent updates.
- Project status: A single-select field that communicates how the project’s going.
- Key updates: Use this text-field for high-level information.
- Next steps: A text-field that details what’s coming up next in your project.
- Completion: This number field can tell you how many tasks in a project are completed.
- Link to project: Use a URL field to give people an easy way to check the project your report is for.
- Last modified: You’ll need this field for your Unito flow to work.
Your report doesn’t have to follow this exact template, of course.
Populating your report with Unito
Now that you’ve got your report, it’s time to make it sing with Unito. Here’s how you can set up your flow in just a few clicks.
Start by connecting Airtable to Unito.
Next, pick the projects you want to report on. They can be from any of our integrations. In this example, we’re using Asana.
After this, it’s time to set up flow direction. Usually, you’ll want to use a two-way flow to automatically keep information updated in both tools at once. But since you’re reporting on a project, you’ll probably want to set up a one-way flow here.
Now it’s time to set up your rules. With rules, you can filter out information you don’t need. Unito always sets default rules that only look for new, open work items. The rules you set up for this use case will depend on your projects. One way to make this work is to have tasks in your projects that serve as “status reports,” and give them a label to that effect. Then, you can sync just tasks with that label to your Airtable report using a rule.
Once you’ve set up your rules, you can customize your field mappings.
Many of our integrations automatically map similar fields, but you’ll want to do things a bit differently for this use case. When you get to the field mapping screen, all you need to do to start pairing things together is click on +Add mapping. With a tool like Asana, you can create custom fields to match the fields in our template.
When mapping your fields, make sure you map them for two-way updates — by keeping the two-way arrow selected on each mapping. That will keep information flowing back and forth.
Once this is done, your flow’s ready to launch! You can build more for each project you want to report on, and even sync them all to the same Airtable report.
Essential Unito features for this use case
Custom fields
Tools like Asana and Jira use custom fields to give users more flexibility. With Unito, you can sync these fields over to any other tool — especially one like Airtable that has versatility built into it. Find out which Unito plans enable you to sync custom fields on our pricing page.
Flow direction
Most integration solutions are one-way by default; more akin to simple automation than full integration. When you want detailed reports, you need a way to keep things automatically updated in both your tools.
Advanced mappings
When you’re dealing with versatile tools, you need an integration that can keep up. Because Unito is just as customizable as your tools, you can make sure information lands where it’s supposed to. No matter how different your tools are.