Ah, you made it look so simple :D That is what I am after but I made a slight mistake on my original post. The model is actually Extract which has a scope method because the table name is dynamic. So the controller code would look something like;

query = Extract::fromTable($lookup->dataset);
		
		foreach ($input as $column => $values) {
		    $query->whereIn($column, $values);
		}

	$zip = $query->first()->zip();

which doesn't work at the moment. How do I get this right using scope?

Scope method;

public function scopeFromTable($query, $tableName) 
{
	return $query->from($tableName);
}

Doesn't work how? What error does it return?

It looks almost right to me, except the last string should be (given that the field name you want is actually zip):

$zip = $query->first()->zip;

Notice no parentheses after ->zip.

Ah, yes. Taking off the parentheses works fine. And returning all the zips I have to do;

$zip[] = $query->select('zip')->get();

Nope, $query->get() returns you a Collection of full rows (with all columns). You can then iterate this Collection, something like:

$rows = $query->get();
$zips = [];
foreach ($rows as $row) {
    $zips[] = $row->zip;
}

But there's a handy function if you want just an array of values from a single column:

$zips = $query->lists('zip');

If you really want to get the hangs of Laravel's way of doing things, watch Laravel 5 Fundamentals video series. It's long (almost 6 hours), but if you are gonna work with Laravel, it's a worthy investment of your time.