Internal requests resolved faster with clear ownership and visibility
A boutique media production company built an internal issue tracker on Airtable, giving operations and IT teams a single place to submit issues, assign owners, and follow progress through to resolution without relying on a separate ticketing platform.
The problem
Operations and IT staff at a boutique media production company had no consistent place to log internal requests. Issues were raised through ad hoc messages and informal follow-up, making it difficult to track what had been submitted, who was responsible, and whether anything had been resolved.
Without a shared view of open items, the same issues were sometimes re-raised because there was no record of prior action. Manual follow-up consumed time that could have gone to production work, and there was no way to see the overall volume or status of internal requests at a glance.
What they built
The team built a standalone Airtable base that serves as the company's internal issue tracker. Staff submit issues through a structured form, each record is assigned an owner, and progress is tracked through status fields from intake to resolution.
The base gives operations and IT a shared daily tool without the overhead of configuring or licensing a dedicated ticketing platform. Product staff also use it, making it a shared point of record for internal requests across three teams.
The outcome
Internal requests now have a defined home, with each issue carrying an owner and a status. Follow-up is driven by the tracker rather than by memory or informal messages, and resolved issues stay on record for future reference.
The team gained daily operational visibility into what is open and who is accountable, removing the ambiguity that previously caused issues to fall through the cracks or be raised more than once.
Inside the solution
Internal issue and request tracking
IT Operations and Governance
Operations
- Issue submission and structured intake
- Owner assignment per request
- Progress tracking from intake to resolution
- No shared record of open internal requests
- Manual and informal follow-up on issues
- Duplicate submissions when prior action was not visible
- Consolidated issue tracking without a dedicated ticketing platform
- Clear owner assignment and accountability per issue
- Daily operational visibility into open and resolved requests
- Operations
- IT
- Product
- None
Issue and request tracking
Give operations, IT, and product one place to submit internal issues, assign an owner, and track every request from intake through to resolution, with a daily operations dashboard showing what is open, who is accountable, and how long things are taking. Automations open a progress log at intake, close the loop on watchers when a request is resolved, and email a Monday digest of everything still open, while AI fields summarise each request, triage new intake, flag likely duplicates, and write the resolution recap that stays on record.
From informal follow-up to a structured internal request tracker
Set up a structured intake form
Assign owners and set statuses
Build a daily operations view
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
A dedicated ticketing platform adds licensing costs and configuration overhead that may not be justified for a small team's internal request volume. Airtable can handle intake forms, owner assignment, and status tracking in a single base that operations and IT staff already use for other work, keeping the toolset consolidated.
Issues are submitted through an Airtable form linked to the tracker base. Each submission creates a new record with the issue description and submitting team captured at intake, so owners have the context they need without having to ask follow-up questions.
Each record carries an owner field, and the tracker's views can be filtered by owner so individuals can see their open items. Because the record persists until it is marked resolved, there is no ambiguity about whether an issue is still active or has been addressed.
Because all open issues are visible in a shared view, staff can check whether an item has already been logged before submitting. Resolved issues remain in the base, so there is also a record of how prior requests were handled that teams can refer back to.
Yes. Fields for priority, due date, or category can be added to the base without rebuilding the structure. Additional views can surface issues by team, function, or resolution time, and an intake form can be updated to capture new fields as the team's needs evolve.