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.