A question about apartment application designing.

[PeachUnicorn]

Hi all,

First of all, I’m a newbie in AppSheet. I learn it by myself doing a lot of test and try. I try learning from template and adapt it to my business yet I faced quite a dead-end so I’m here asking for some suggestions and tips from you all.

The point is I’m trying to create an application to help with my apartment business. The room has a fixed number but tenants are depends. In my google sheet, I have 3 sheets contains of 1. Database - contains of Room number and tenants detail, 2. Payment sheets and 3. Assets sheet.

The problem I faced are listed below

1. I have no idea how to keep previous tenants details. The function that I can do is overwriting it. The tenants have two types monthly tenants and daily tenants.

2. In my database sheet, the rows are Room number and the sheets are filled with a lot of column with tenant details. When I see it on the application, the only view that easiest to read is ‘table’ but I want to make it more user-friendly. Is it possible to have gallery view with 4-6 options based on status of the room (Vacent/booked) or payment status.

For better understanding, please see images below. I want my interface to be as in right picture but i have no idea how to do it.

3. I’m planning to settle payment on GoogleSheets and be able to generate invoices (bulk invoices) in one pdf. I’m still trying to make it out but I’ve already done creating invoice template on GoogleDoc. Is it possible to create a button to print all filtered invoices to one pdf?

4. Lastly, I’m not sure whether in long terms the apps might slow down. Should I create another application for payment and assets tracking or not?

Thank you for your times reading my problems.

I truly hope I could get a suggestion/solution/ or any tips from you all. I’m eager to learn more about AppSheet.

[That-Haus]

Hey,

i’m going to try my best here to give you some advice and maybe answer your questions mainly how i would approach this project. I’m going to be honest and say i have never built an app to do what you’re asking but from what you’ve said i think a lot of the info from my warehouse and stock apps will apply.

Firstly i tend to build apps starting with the database side, normally using appsheet, this really helps me understand what i’m up aganst before i start designing the use of the app, i think this is where you may have fallen over at the start as to be honest i never found template apps to be all that helpful.

The second issue i can see from your setup is you’ve placed the main design of the app aorund the room but i think you should do this around the customer.

Let me go through how i would do this then see if i can answer your questions.

How i would do this
first i would build a customer managment sheet, this would be a sheet with the customers name, contact details, payment info (anything you need) and on this same sheet id add a status column and a room number column.

For status i would see you’d start with 3 “Checked In - Monthly” “Checked in - Daily” and “Checked Out”

This way you can easily filter this with views to show you only checked in people, or only checked in on monthly etc etc.

Then the reason we add room number is so you can see whos booked to each room like you wanted however once these poeple check out, you’ll be able to see what room they had and all their details will be there forever.

As far as views id make one for “Active rooms” where i would create a slice to only show me rooms that are not checked out, the expression for this would be [Status] <> “Checked Out”

From here i would have an “All Customers view” to see all my customers a, this also means i can search them

finally i would have an add customer view for checking in new customers, so this would be a form view that automatically sets the status to checked in and lets me assign a room number.

Once you have this very simple app yo can add more to it, things i think would be nice are below

• Data validation on room number that checks the room is actually available
• Check our room check where you can add photos of the room for records
• Payment status’
• Check in/ check out dates automatically added

hope this build is helpful.

Your questions

as far as your questions i’ve answered them as best as i can below

1. Keeping their details, if you design your app around the customer first rather than rooms you’ll be able to keep past records
2. You can design around any view type, my fav or mobile apps is card view where you can then click into it to get more detail.
3. Bulk invoices is going to be difficult through the app. It would be easier to connect your app to a service like Xero and zapier/pabbly, then using automations (bots) in appsheet you could automate this
4. I would be very surpised if a well designed app at this scale would be slow. Even my very large data tables (100k+) can read and write in less an 3 seconds so i don’t think youll have an issue with scale.

Hope this helps you

[jaichith]

Hi there, What does zapier, pabbly, xero do ?

Have you worked more than 100K rows ? Are you using google sheet or some other source?

[That-Haus]

Hey

So Zapier is an automation API connection tool. Basically speaking you can use it as a gateway to other apps. You’ll find most people use it to make a connection between 2 well used apps such as Gmail and Appsheet to automate incoming emails etc. Theres litrally thousands of things you can do with it.

Pabbly is very similar to Zapier in how it works but a lot of people find its interface easier to understand and its much cheaper.

Xero is accountancy software. Much easier to send invoices/ deal with payment through that system.

I primarily use google sheets as a datebase and my biggest app at the moment has around 25 connected data sources totalling more than 1.1m rows. This app still runs great and will scale beyond this size with relative ease.

[jaichith]

Do you use enterprise plan?

https://support.google.com/appsheet/answer/12653576?hl=en