If you've ever managed customer orders in a spreadsheet, this probably looks familiar: the same customer name, phone number, and email address, copy-pasted over and over again on every single order row.

It works — until it doesn't. A customer changes their phone number, and now you have five different versions of their contact info scattered across five different rows. One typo, and suddenly "Sarah Johnson" and "Sara Johnson" are treated as two different people.

In this tutorial, we'll fix that problem for good by building a Customer Order Tracker — a simple app where customers and orders are properly linked, instead of duplicated.

Before (Spreadsheet)	After (Ambisius)
Spreadsheet showing repeated customer info across multiple order rows	Ambisius Customer and Order tables connected through a link field

Why this matters

This isn't just about looking tidy. When your data is duplicated instead of linked, every update becomes a manual chore — and every typo becomes a data integrity problem. Linking solves both.

Step 1: Create the Customer Table

Every order tracker starts with knowing who you're tracking. Let's create a table to hold customer information — once, and only once.

Click this add button to add new table

Add a table called Customer

Add the basic fields you'd expect: Name, Phone, Email, and Address.

Click this schema button to quickly add new column

added name, phone, email and address column

Think in entities, not rows

A spreadsheet encourages you to think in rows. A database encourages you to think in entities — a Customer, an Order, a Product. This shift is what makes everything downstream so much easier.

Step 2: Create the Order Table

Next, create a separate table for Order — this is where each transaction will live.

Sidebar showing a new table being created and named Order

Add a few basic fields: Order Date, Product, and Amount.

Order table with Order Date, Product, and Amount fields added

At this point, you have two separate tables — but they don't know anything about each other yet. That's what we'll fix next.

Step 3: Link Customer to Order

This is the part that spreadsheets simply can't do well: connecting two tables so they reference each other automatically.

In the Order table, add a new column and choose One to Many as the data type.

Select One to Many data type to link to other table

Select Customer as the table to link to — since one customer can have many orders.

Select Customer table to link to

What just happened

You've just told Ambisius that every Order belongs to exactly one Customer, and every Customer can have multiple Orders. From here, this relationship works both ways — automatically.

Step 4: Add Your Data

Let's see this in action. First, add one customer record.

Click here to add a new record

Fill in the information in the form

Add more 4 more records

five customer records created

Now, create a new Order row. Instead of retyping "Sarah Johnson" and her contact details, simply click the Customer field and select her from a searchable dropdown.

select Customer picker here

You can pick the Customer data you have inserted

Add two or three more orders, all linked to the same customer.

Order table showing four separate rows all linked to Sarah Johnson

Notice what didn't happen here — you never retyped her name, phone, or email. You just picked her from a list, every time.

Step 5: See the Impact — Order Summary in One Place

Here's where linking really pays off. Instead of scrolling through the Order table to manually count how many times Sarah has ordered, let's bring that number straight into the Customer table.

Go to the Customer table, add a new column, and choose Rollup as the data type. Select the linked Order field, then choose Count as the calculation.

Select Rollup in data type to add

Select Order as the table to rollup and then select count

Instantly, Sarah Johnson's row shows 4 — the exact number of orders linked to her, calculated automatically.

Customer table showing a new Total Orders column with Sarah Johnson's count displayed as 4

Want to know how much she's spent in total? Add another Rollup column, this time using Sum on the Amount field instead.

Select Sum for total spent by Customer

Why this matters

In a spreadsheet, answering "how many orders has this customer made?" or "how much have they spent?" means manually filtering or writing a formula every time. Here, the answer is already sitting right there, updated automatically as new orders come in.

Step 6: Update Once, Reflect Everywhere

Let's say Sarah's phone number changes. Update it once, in the Customer table.

Editing Sarah Johnson's phone number field in the Customer table

Now open any of her linked orders — the updated phone number is already there, with no extra steps.

Order record showing Sarah Johnson's updated phone number automatically reflected

What this replaces

This single step replaces what would normally be five separate manual edits across five different spreadsheet rows — and the risk of missing one and leaving outdated info behind.

Recap: What You Built

In just a few steps, you created:

A Customer table to store each customer once
An Order table to track transactions
A link connecting the two, so every order knows its customer — and every customer knows their orders

What you had before	What you have now
Duplicate customer info in every row	One customer record, referenced everywhere
Manual counting of orders per customer	Instant, automatic order history per customer
Risk of outdated info after edits	One update, reflected everywhere instantly

This same linking pattern — one entity connected to many related records — is the foundation for almost everything else you'll build in Ambisius, from invoices to appointments to inventory.

Try it yourself

This exact setup is available as a ready-made template. Duplicate it, explore it live, and make it yours with just few clicks.