Airtable Systems at Ghost

The evolution

It started as a spreadsheet called “Sales Tracker” in 2022 — every deal tracked by hand, data scattered across tabs. We moved to Asana for project management, then scaled the team with offshore contractors, but inventory tracking kept outgrowing the tools. In 2024 I rebuilt the whole thing in Airtable from scratch: linked bases, automations that run themselves, dashboards that update live. That’s the version that stuck.

Base 01 — Inventory Upload

The core base takes messy seller inventory — spreadsheets, emails, whatever they send — and turns it into clean records ready to list. Linked records, rollups, and AI-generated fields make every stage of the pipeline visible without anyone asking for an update.

Account managers, brand partners, and offshore contractors all work from the same data, across a dashboard for weekly listing summaries, an itemizing pipeline for status tracking, and a submission form for new lots. Product and inventory tables follow each item from intake to sale; entity tables hold people and orgs; workflow tables handle ops and exceptions.

Base 02 — Deal Approvals

Our director of finance had deal approvals spread across email and Asana. I pulled admin data into Airtable, synced it with the metrics she cared about, and gave her one place to review and approve everything.

An n8n workflow lets her approve or reject a deal just by reacting to a Slack notification with an emoji. The automation pulls the deal data, formats the financials, looks up the right admin and account manager, and posts a complete summary — threading updates back to the original message by storing the Slack timestamp in Airtable.

Base 03 — Enterprise Offers

This base standardizes how we build linesheets for enterprise buyers like Costco, Sam’s Club, and BJ’s. My team gathers market data and the system formats it into whatever template each buyer needs — pulling from inventory data, Shopify listings, and internal databases to match what we have to what the buyer wants.

Base 04 — International Quotes

International deals carry different logistics, compliance, and pricing, so they get their own base instead of cluttering the domestic pipeline.

Under the hood

The automations run everything — timestamps, webhook triggers, Slack notifications, data ingestion — without anyone touching them. Date fields auto-update between stages to show processing speed. Button-triggered scripts call n8n to write listing descriptions from seller inventory files. TableFlow parses and cleans seller spreadsheets, matches them against existing records, and imports them. Linked records sync across all four bases automatically, and Slack alerts fire on stage changes, new submissions, and deal updates — threaded to the right channel.