My appointments live in Airtable, can WACO send the WhatsApp reminders?

Plenty of clinics are perfectly happy keeping appointments in Airtable: tidy calendar, custom columns, a team that already knows it. WACO will not ask you to move. What Airtable cannot do is send official WhatsApp messages to patients; that part is ours.

Once connected, every row in your Airtable schedule becomes a reservation in WACO, and the H-1 reminder runs by itself following the rules you set on the Reminders page. You keep working in Airtable exactly as before.

What you need

• An Airtable table holding at least the patient's WhatsApp number and a date. Name, time and notes are optional but make the WACO agenda far easier to read.
• An Airtable Personal Access Token: created once at airtable.com/create/tokens.

Step 1, create the Airtable token

1. Open airtable.com/create/tokens → Create new token.
2. Name it anything, e.g. "WACO".
3. Under Scopes, pick just two: data.records:read and schema.bases:read. Both are read permissions. WACO never writes to your Airtable.
4. Under Access, select the base holding your schedule.
5. Copy the token (starts with pat…). It is shown only once.

Step 2, connect it in WACO

1. Open the Reservations menu → the Sync from Airtable card.
2. Paste the token and click Connect. It is stored encrypted; if Airtable rejects it, WACO tells you immediately and stores nothing.
3. Pick the Base, Table and (optionally) a View: a view is handy when you only want part of the rows, e.g. a "Scheduled" view.
4. Match the columns: WhatsApp number and date are required; name, time and notes are optional. You pick from your own column names, so there is nothing to mistype.
5. Click Save & enable sync: the first pull runs immediately and you see the result straight away.

How it behaves day to day

• New row in Airtable → new reservation in WACO (within 10 minutes).
• Date or time changed → the reservation follows, and its reminder moves to the correct day.
• Row deleted (or dropped out of the view) → the reservation is cancelled and its reminder switched off. If a great many rows vanish at once, usually a sign the view or filter changed rather than real cancellations. WACO deliberately holds back mass cancellation so no patient is cancelled because of a misconfiguration.
• Rows without a readable number or date are skipped quietly (and counted in the sync report) instead of failing the whole sync.
• Only the last 7 days onwards is pulled, years of history will not bury today's agenda.

What the sync deliberately does NOT do

Synced reservations do not fire an instant confirmation message. That protects you: one filter change in Airtable can surface hundreds of rows at once, and that would turn into hundreds of paid messages to patients. What does run automatically is the H-1 reminder per your rules on the Reminders page, the part that actually reduces no-shows.

If you do want an instant confirmation, record that appointment through the form on the Reservations page instead, that path sends the confirmation template you chose.

Stopping the sync

Click Disconnect on the Airtable card. Reservations already pulled stay (they are your data); only the pulling of new rows stops. You can also revoke the token yourself at any time from Airtable's token page.