Common Stackby Decisions

Future-proof a Stackby base by standardizing structure, reducing duplication, and leaning on relationships and computed fields. These six design choices help teams scale with clarity and confidence.

Keep everything for one workflow in one stack

Consolidate the full lifecycle of a single workflow (e.g., “Client Delivery” or “Editorial Operations”) into one stack.

Keeping the related tables—like Projects, Tasks, Assets, and Clients—together makes relationships easy to model, updates consistent, and reporting reliable.

• When to split: Only separate into another base if the information belongs to a different workflow, a separate business unit, or has distinct permission needs.

• If data must live elsewhere: Mirror it into the base via sync/connectors, not manual duplication.

Take action:

• Audit: Are team members jumping across multiple stacks for one workflow? Merge into one stack and rewire views/permissions to fit.

Reduce redundant tables with new views

Each table should represent a distinct entity (Clients, Projects, Tasks). Avoid creating separate tables for similar lists (e.g., “Clients—EMEA” and “Clients—US”). Instead, keep one Clients table and create views filtered by region, owner, or segment.

• Use views for role/region/segment-specific lenses.

• Hide nonessential fields, set filters and sorts, group by stage or owner, and lock critical views.

Take action:

• Consolidate near-duplicate tables into one.

• Recreate specialization with named, saved views (e.g., “Sales: EMEA clients,” “CS: At-risk accounts”).

Streamline your workflow with linked records

If a field’s “options” start needing their own attributes (contacts, clients, channels), they’ve outgrown a single select. Convert to a linked record to unlock lookups, rollups, and counts.

• Example: Projects → Clients (linked), then lookup Client → Account owner and SLA into Projects.

• Benefits: One source of truth, bi-directional visibility, summary metrics across relationships.

Take action:

• Identify fields that reference real “things” with extra details. Convert to a linked record and add those attributes in the new table.

• Add lookups/rollups/counts where summaries or cross-table context help decision-making.

Reduce manual input with formulas

Automate what’s derivable. If a value depends on other fields (dates, numbers, statuses), compute it with formulas.

• Common patterns:
  
  

  • Date math: Days remaining, Review date = Due date - 7 days.

  • Health flags: Overdue, SLA breach risk.

  • Text composition: “Client – Project – Release MM/YYYY”.

  • Financials: Budget variance, Utilization %.

• Outcome: Fewer manual edits, fewer errors, more consistent reporting.

Take action:

• List fields that are frequently retyped or recalculated. Replace with formulas that compute them from trusted inputs.

Optimize your primary field

The primary field is the record’s “name.” Keep it short, unique, and human-readable so a record remains recognizable even when other columns are hidden.

• Good examples: “Q3 Launch: Landing Page,” “ACME – Website Redesign,” “Ticket #431 – Auth bug”.

• Make a formula primary field if needed to ensure uniqueness (e.g., concatenate Name + Date + Short ID).

Take action:

• Review primary fields across tables. Ensure they uniquely identify records and follow a naming convention (and add a helper ID if needed).

Look up key details across tables

Use Lookups (and Rollups/Counts) to bring authoritative data across tables via links—update once, reflect everywhere.

Examples:

• From Clients → into Projects: Account owner, SLA tier.

• From Projects → into Tasks: Launch date, Project status.

• From Tasks → into Projects: Count tasks, Rollup completed tasks, Sum estimated hours.

Benefit: Fewer duplicate fields, guaranteed consistency, faster audits.

Take action:

• Replace duplicated columns with Lookups where the source of truth exists in a related table.

• Add Rollups/Counts to power dashboards and capacity views.