One single source of truth for ticket procurement and fulfillment
A live events ticket resale and inventory operations company runs its entire procurement and fulfillment workflow in Airtable: purchase request routing, inventory processing for roughly 500,000 records, post purchase status updates, refund eligibility checks, and cross team auditing. Operations, Purchasing, and Distribution replaced manual handoffs with one base that 10 to 100 concurrent staff work from every day.
The problem
Purchase requests, inventory updates, and refund decisions moved through manual handoffs with no shared system of record. Teams could not tell who owned a request, when it was last touched, or whether a refund was actually eligible without waiting on a slow, manual check.
The ticketing inventory system enforced hourly API rate limits that forced batch syncing instead of live updates, and the underlying inventory set had grown to roughly 500,000 records, more than any spreadsheet or ad hoc tool could track reliably across Operations, Purchasing, and Distribution.
What they built
Operations, Purchasing, and Distribution built a single base that routes and claims purchase requests, cross references post purchase status against the ticketing inventory system on an hourly batch cycle, and processes and broadcasts inventory updates across roughly 500,000 records.
An AI field searches the web for event cancellation confirmations to validate refund eligibility automatically, removing the wait on manual research. Every request, claim, and status change writes to an audit trail that any team can review without asking someone else what happened.
The outcome
Operations now runs on a single source of truth that 10 to 100 concurrent staff can rely on, with claim and log tracking that eliminates dropped handoffs and gives managers a real accountability trail for output and errors.
Refund decisions move faster because the AI cancellation search replaces manual confirmation lookups, and the team can make rapid workflow changes without waiting on developer support.
Inside the solution
Event Ticket Inventory Procurement and Order Fulfillment
Events & Experience Management
- Purchase request routing and claiming
- Post purchase cross referencing and status updates
- Inventory processing and broadcasting across ~500k records
- Refund eligibility validation via AI event cancellation search
- Audit trails and error escalation
- API rate limits requiring hourly batch syncs
- Manual handoffs and lack of accountability between teams
- Slow refund decisions without cancellation confirmation
- Need for rapid workflow changes without developer dependency
- Single source of truth for 10 to 100 concurrent staff
- Eliminates dropped handoffs with a claim and log system
- Accountability and output trend analysis
- AI accelerated refund validation
- Operations
- Purchasing
- Inventory Processing
- Refunds
- Distribution
- Revenue Management
- A ticketing inventory system
- A cloud data warehouse
- Gmail
- Webhooks
- Internal point of sale systems
Event Inventory Procurement & Order Fulfillment
Route, claim and fulfil ticket purchase requests in one base, with inventory lots, orders, refund cases and hourly batch sync runs all linked to the same event catalogue and a claim-and-log audit trail any team can read. Airtable AI drafts the routing brief for each request, digests the post-purchase cross-reference, triages sync exceptions and searches for event cancellation confirmations so refund eligibility decisions do not wait on a manual lookup.
From manual handoffs to a single source of truth
Copy the templates
Add claim and audit fields
Wire the syncs and AI checks
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Records are processed and broadcast in batches synced hourly from the ticketing inventory system and the cloud data warehouse, so the base stays responsive for the 10 to 100 staff working it while still reflecting near real time inventory status.
The ticketing inventory system enforces API rate limits, so batch syncing on an hourly cycle is the reliable pattern that keeps data current without hitting those limits.
An AI field runs a web search for event cancellation confirmations, giving the Refunds team a fast, sourced answer instead of a manual lookup before approving or denying a refund.
A claim and log system requires every purchase request to have an owner and a visible status, so Operations, Purchasing, and Distribution can see exactly where a request sits without asking around.
No. The ticketing inventory system and the cloud data warehouse remain systems of record for external inventory data. Airtable orchestrates the internal workflow, routing, claiming, refund validation, and auditing, on top of that data.