I’ve been struggling with this issue all afternoon.
I’m developing a simple personal finance application and want to implement a “transfer between accounts” feature. This function should open a form where I can enter the “from account,” “to account,” and “amount” fields.
Once submitted, the action should create two transactions in the “transactions” sheet: one with a positive sign and one with a negative sign, ensuring the correct debit and credit of the respective accounts.
I know how to use a grouped action to generate these two transactions, but I’m unsure how to handle the form itself. It seems there’s no way to create a form field that isn’t tied to an existing column or virtual column. In this case, I need the form to collect values for “from account” and “to account” and then execute the grouped actions based on these inputs. This would require some sort of “virtual form field,” which doesn’t appear to exist in AppSheet.
The only workaround I can think of is creating virtual columns for “from account” and “to account.” These columns would remain empty for most transactions but be used specifically for transfer transactions. However, this feels inefficient.
You haven’t articulated precisely the issue you are facing. So I am going to take an educated guess that you are finding there isn’t a way to access the entered Amount that is to be used to adjust the Balances on each Account. Am I right?
You will want to use the INPUT() function. It is a dual purpose function but most importantly allows for passing of data values between certain action types. Please refer to the article below on how to set this up.
I basically want to have a button that opens a form where the user inputs an amount that needs to be transfered from one account to another. Just three form fields. The action creates 2 distinct transactions in the transaction sheet. One for the account being debited and one for the account been debited. The point is that I cannot find an action type that creates a prompt with fields that are not dependent on existing columns, because in my case the two form fields “from account” and “to account” would operate on two different transactions created by two different actions.
Ok, so If I understand correctly the “selector” table only purpose is to be able to select the debit account, credit account and amount values. Right?
This table will not record all transfers over time so there would be no redundant records since the transfer are already recorded in the transactions table.
It does but it’s not redundant data.
Transactions table records CR/DR transactions for each account.
Selector records the “flow”, where from?, where to?, how much?.
With some adjustment (add a column to store a positive or negative amount based on bank being CR/DR), you can create a statement to display £££ availability.
