How to Trigger External Systems from Airtable Using a Button and Webhook

Your business runs entirely on Airtable, and some records need to be shared with external systems to generate invoices, update dashboards, or trigger other processes.

You want to set up a workflow that notifies an external system when a record is ready.

A user clicks a button in Airtable to mark a record as ready for external processing.

When the button is clicked, Airtable should inform the webhook URL, which listens for incoming requests.

The external system can then fetch all record details via the Airtable API.

How do you set up such a workflow?

Setting up the webhook

Setting this up is very simple.

Start by creating a Button field inside your table. When you create the button field, select Open URL as the action for the button click.

The URL you provide will be the webhook endpoint where Airtable will send the request. To let the external system know which record to fetch, pass the Airtable record ID in the URL.

A typical URL looks like this:

"https://hook.us1.make.com/xxxxxxxxxx?id=" & RECORD_ID()

This appends the Airtable record ID as a query parameter.

When the user clicks the button, Airtable opens the URL, sending an HTTP request to your webhook. The external system receives the record ID and can then make a call to the Airtable API to retrieve all fields and related data for that record.