Your Portal's Labels: Say Job, Claim or Request
Set the record name for a table and roughly twenty strings follow it, from the create button to the delete prompt, so the portal speaks your customers' language.
Your logo can be on the page and the portal can still sound like software. Nobody in a plumbing business calls a job a record, and nobody at an insurer calls a claim one either.
Labels are your portal's own vocabulary, set per table.
What it does
Each table has a Labels tab. The setting that does most of the work is the record name, singular and plural.
Set the singular to "job" and roughly twenty strings follow it:
- The create and edit dialog titles
- The delete prompt and its confirm button
- Five toast messages and four empty states, including the ones on related tabs
- The screen-reader names on the row buttons
A handful of others are set separately when you want them: the create button, the form submit captions, the Details tab, the heading shown when a record has no name, and the view-mode toggles on calendar and kanban.
Why it matters
Wording is the part of an interface people read without noticing, which is exactly why the wrong wording is felt. "Delete this record" asks someone to translate; "Delete this claim" does not.
For a portal you hand to customers, that translation is a small tax on every screen, paid by the person you were trying to make things easier for.
Two behaviors to know
Only what you type is stored. An empty box shows the built-in wording as gray placeholder text, so leaving it empty is how you keep the default, not how you blank it. The one thing filled in for you is the plural: set a singular without one and the plural is derived and saved alongside it.
Labels are per role, like every other table setting, but a label set on the default role is inherited by any role that has not set its own. So the normal case is setting them once and having every role use them.
What it does not change
Labels change the portal's own words only. Nothing is written back to Airtable, field labels still come from your Airtable field names, the page name in the sidebar still comes from the Airtable table name, and the login screen and login-code email are unchanged.
How it works
Open the table's Labels tab, set the singular and plural, and check the portal. The labels guide lists every string the record name drives and every box you can set separately.
Who it is for
Portals with a domain vocabulary, which is most of them once you look: maintenance portals with jobs, insurance portals with claims, internal request portals with requests, and animal shelters with animals.
Try it on your own base
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