Generate PDF Certificates at Scale with Airtable

When a cohort finishes a course, someone has to issue certificates. If you are doing it manually — opening a template, typing each name, exporting to PDF, repeating — it takes a long time and it is easy to make mistakes.

This guide shows a simpler approach. Airtable holds your participant data. Automette reads that data and generates a PDF certificate for each person. The whole thing takes about 15 minutes to set up, and after that it runs on its own.

What you will need

• An Automette account — free to start
• An Airtable base with your participant data
• The Certificate of Completion template (we will add this in Step 2)

No coding needed.

Step 1: Set up your Airtable base

Create a table in Airtable with one row per participant. You need at least these four fields:

• Full Name — as it should appear on the certificate
• Completion Date — a date or text field
• Status — a single select field, used to trigger generation
• Certificate — a URL field where the PDF link will be saved

The Status field is what drives the automation. When it changes to Completed, Automette generates the certificate for that row. You can add other fields too — course name, score, cohort — but those four are what you need to get started.

Step 2: Add the Certificate of Completion template

In Automette, go to the template library and find Certificate of Completion under the Education category. Click Use template and give your project a name.

The template opens in the editor. It is a landscape A4 PDF with a gold border, an official seal, the recipient name, course name, completion date, instructor signature, and a certificate ID. At the top of the template you will see the variables:

#let cert = (
  organization_name: "Bright Horizons Academy",
  recipient_name: "Priya Sharma",
  course_name: "Advanced Data Analytics Masterclass",
  completion_date: "15 May 2026",
  instructor_name: "Dr. Arun Mehta",
  instructor_title: "Lead Instructor",
  certificate_id: "CERT-2026-00142",
)

Some of these are fixed for the whole cohort — organisation name, course name, instructor. Update those now and they will be the same on every certificate. The values that change per person — recipient_name, completion_date, and certificate_id — will be filled in from Airtable.

Step 3: Connect your Airtable account

Go to Settings → Connections in Automette and click Connect Airtable. You will go through a standard OAuth flow — log in, pick which bases to grant access to, and confirm.

You only need to do this once. The same connection works for all your Automette projects.

Step 4: Build the automation

In your Automette project, go to the Automations tab and click New automation.

Name and source

Give the automation a name and select Airtable as the source.

Choose the trigger

Select Airtable row updated. This fires whenever a field on a record reaches a value you define — in this case, when Status changes to Completed.

Select your base and table

Choose the Airtable connection you set up in Step 3, then select your base and the Participants table. Automette will load your table's fields so you can choose which field to watch and what value to trigger on.

Set the output action

Choose what happens with the finished PDF. Two options:

• Write link — saves the PDF URL back to a field on the Airtable record
• Attach file — uploads the PDF directly as an Airtable attachment

Write link is usually the better choice — it is faster and easy to forward to participants. Point it at the Certificate field you created in Step 1.

Map your fields

The last step is field mapping — connecting each Airtable column to the corresponding template variable:

Hit Save. Automette registers a webhook on your Airtable base — from this point on, any matching record update triggers the automation.

Step 5: Test with one record

Go to Airtable and change one test record's Status to Completed. Within a few seconds, Automette generates the certificate and writes the PDF link back to that record's Certificate field.

Click the link and check it looks right — name, date, layout. If anything needs adjusting, edit the template, save, and test again. Get it right on one record before moving to the full cohort.

Step 6: Generate all 100 certificates

Once the test looks right, select all your participant rows in Airtable and bulk-update Status to Completed. Automette processes them in parallel — within a couple of minutes, every record has a personalised PDF certificate link in the Certificate field.

You can watch progress in Automette's History tab. If any record fails — say a name field was left blank — it is flagged on its own without affecting the rest.

Distributing the certificates

Once the links are in Airtable, a few ways to get them to participants:

• Airtable automation — add a second automation that triggers on the same Status change and emails each participant their certificate link
• Email campaign — filter the table by Completed status and use the Certificate URLs in a personalised send
• LMS — paste the certificate URL into the student's completion record in Teachable, Kajabi, or whichever platform you use

The next cohort takes zero setup

Your template and automation stay as they are. When the next cohort finishes, add their rows to the same Airtable table, update Status to Completed, and certificates generate exactly as before.

For a different course, duplicate the Automette project, update the course name and instructor in the template, and point the automation at a new table. The setup is the same — you are just changing the data.