Every airport run quoted, invoiced and dispatched without touching a keyboard twice

Stop 1 · Request

A passenger asks for a price

The trip starts on nmcarservice.com, where one form handles both airport runs and point-to-point trips.

The form asks a single branching question — is one of your locations an airport? — and reveals only the fields that matter for that answer. Airport trips get an airport picker and require the airline and flight number; everything else gets a plain pickup and drop-off address. Round trips open a second date, time and return flight.

The airline and flight number are required fields. They were optional at launch, and the calendar entries that reached drivers without them were the first thing we had to fix.

Stop 2 · Capture

Zapier files it and wakes up dispatch

Submitting the form triggers the first Zap, which decides what kind of trip this is before it writes anything down.

The Zap splits three ways on the airport question — no airport, airport at pickup, airport at drop-off — because each shape needs different fields stitched together. Each path creates the Airtable record, sends dispatch an SMS, reads the new record back to capture its ID, and fires a second confirmation. The record ID becomes the key that every later step in the chain hangs off.

Stop 3 · Price

Dispatch types one number

This is the only human step in the chain, and the interface is built so it takes under a minute.

An Airtable interface shows only the requests still awaiting a price — everything already quoted, accepted or declined moves to its own tab. The record opens with pickup, drop-off, passenger count, flight details and any customer note grouped for scanning. Dispatch enters the price and driver split, adds an optional comment, and presses Send Quote.

Reordering this screen so unpriced requests surface first — instead of one long mixed list — was the single change that made the system usable day to day.

Stop 4 · Quote

The quote lands as email and SMS

Within seconds the passenger has a branded quote in their inbox and a text on their phone.

The Send Quote button posts to a webhook that pulls the full record and builds an HTML email: the route, the price, the trust badges, and two buttons — accept or decline. A personalised video is generated from a template and embedded as the hero, so the quote arrives as something the passenger actually opens. If the video render fails, the Zap falls down an error branch and the quote still goes out by email and SMS rather than silently dying.

Stop 5 · Decision

Accept or decline, in one tap

Both buttons land on a real page on the company's own site, not a raw automation endpoint.

Each quote carries two unique links stamped with the record ID. Tapping either one opens a branded confirmation page on nmcarservice.com and flips the record's status in Airtable — approved or denied — with no login and no reply-to-this-email step. That status is the switch the rest of the chain watches.

The first version dropped customers on a bare automation URL. One confused passenger was enough — we moved both outcomes onto the company's own domain the same day.

Stop 6 · Invoice

Square builds the invoice itself

An accepted quote becomes a real customer record, an order and a sent invoice without anyone opening Square.

The approval webhook looks the record up, formats the dates, creates the Google contact and the Square customer, then branches on round trip versus one way — a return leg needs its own order lines and its own date maths. Square issues the invoice, and the Airtable record is updated with the invoice reference so quote and payment stay joined up.

Only invoices raised through this chain are tracked. Anything typed straight into Square bypasses Airtable — a boundary worth naming out loud rather than discovering later.

Stop 7 · Dispatch

The driver's calendar fills in

The trip reaches the driver as a calendar event they can navigate from, not a paragraph they have to decode.

This is the widest Zap in the system: it branches on new versus recurring customer, on which end of the trip is the airport, and on which airport the return flies into — because a passenger who leaves from JFK and comes back into Bradley needs two different events. Each event carries the flight number, the passenger count and both addresses as one-tap Waze deep links.

Google Calendar allows exactly one location field. Pickup goes there so the phone's default navigation picks it up; drop-off rides in the body as a Waze link.

Stop 8 · Recover

Nothing is left hanging

The quotes that don't convert are worth as much as the ones that do — so the system asks about them.

A declined quote triggers an email and SMS asking why, pointing at a short Airtable form with a set of reasons and a free-text option. Quotes that go quiet are chased daily until the pickup date, then expire themselves rather than sitting in the queue forever. Every reason lands back in the same base, so pricing decisions are made against recorded feedback instead of memory.