Triage maintenance tickets and assign vendors with Airtable, Twilio and Gmail

This n8n template demonstrates how to triage tenant maintenance requests automatically; matching each ticket to the right contractor by category and postcode area, dispatching the job by email and SMS, and detecting duplicate tickets before they snowball.

Use cases are many: residential lettings agencies juggling dozens of properties, short-let and HMO operators tired of duplicate "is anyone fixing this?" tickets, or commercial property managers who need a paper trail for every dispatch. Oher industries juggling tickets can use the system too!

Good to know

• Each Twilio SMS is billed per message. See Twilio SMS pricing for the rate in your country; UK SMS costs ~$0.04 at time of writing.
• The postcode-matching logic in this template is built around UK postcodes (e.g. SW1A 1AA → SW1). For US ZIP codes or other formats, you'll need to adjust the Extract Postcode District code node.
• The duplicate-detection window is 24 hours by default; adjust it inside the Evaluate Duplicates code node for your portfolio size.
• Any CRM will do if you don't want to use Airtable.

How it works

1. The Airtable Trigger polls the Maintenance Tickets table every minute for new tenant submissions.
2. Before anything else, we check for duplicates; same tenant, same property, same category, within the last 24 hours. Matches get flagged as Possible Duplicate and an alert email goes to the admin.
3. For real new tickets, we normalise the postcode (e.g. SW1A 1AA becomes SW1) so the search matches on area rather than the full code.
4. We then search the Vendors table for active vendors who handle that category and serve that postcode district, sorted by response time, and pick the fastest match.
5. If we find a vendor, we update the ticket (assigned, status Assigned, timestamp), email the vendor the full job details, fire a Twilio SMS so they see it on their phone within seconds, and email the tenant a confirmation with the contractor's name and expected response time.
6. If no vendor matches, we don't drop the ticket on the floor; we set the status to Pending Manual Assignment, email the admin so a human can step in, and email the tenant a holding message so they know the request landed.

How to use

• Duplicate the Airtable base before you import; you need a Vendors table and a Maintenance Tickets table. The schema is documented in the sticky notes inside the workflow.
• The trigger polls every minute by default, but feel free to swap it for an Airtable webhook (instant) if you have an Enterprise plan, or a form/webhook trigger if tenants submit elsewhere.
• The vendor SMS uses Twilio; replace the from number with your verified Twilio number before going live.
• Set the admin email in the two admin Gmail nodes (Email to Admin - Alert and Send Duplicate Alert to Admin) so escalations land in the right inbox.

Requirements

• Airtable base with Vendors and Maintenance Tickets tables
• Gmail account for vendor, tenant, and admin emails
• Twilio account with a verified from number for SMS

Customising this workflow

The same triage pattern works anywhere you need to route inbound requests by category and location. Try it for field-service dispatch, IT helpdesk ticket assignment, or routing customer support tickets to the right specialist based on issue type and language.