pro-Forms^® - Frequently Asked Questions

Virtually any kind of form can be created using pro-Forms^® by companies and organisations of any size and working in any industry. Our customers vary from owner managed private companies to large international corporations through to the world of education and not for profit.

Examples of forms our customers create include :

Forms are built using drag and drop from a comprehensive list of available components & field types and can include skip logic, calculations and visibility conditions. pro-Forms^® Mobile forms fields can also be pre-populated from data files and sets associated with a form.

YES.

No form building experience or knowledge is required to use the system. Everything you need to build and issue forms to field workers is available within your monthly subscription.

The steps for creating a form are :-

1. BUILD - use drag & drop to add questions types to your form. Questions/ fields can be configured with visibility, default answers, calculations, skip logic, formatting e.g. decimal/ integer, mandation, read-only and encryption.

2. EXPORTS - a layout is how you would like a completed form to look when received by your office or a Customer e.g. with your company branding, logo, address, contact details and accreditations. Our Layouts can be built in MS Word and uploaded to the system. Other layout types can include html emails and csv structured files.

3. SHARE - this options lets you specify where completed forms and their layouts get sent and by what methods. For example, office staff may want a Word layout of a completed form sent to a OneDrive folder whilst the customer may want to receive a PDF copy attached to a branded email. When a new form submission is received by the system sharing options can be triggered to run automatically, run by hand and/ or on one or more conditions being met.

4. REPORTS - adding a Custom Report for a form is not a necessity for the form to be used in the field but is a good means of consolidating individual form data into an Excel compatible file. A Custom Report can be branded, automatically run at pre-set time intervals, sent to one or more people by email and password protected.

YES.

Approximately 75% of our smaller customers ask that we build their forms for them as they usually busy running their companies. Typically a form can be built and the layout & custom reports produced for a one-off cost of £40+VAT. Discounts are applied if multiple forms are to be built.

Form more information please click here

Not on the Mobile Plan. There are limits though on the Online Forms Plan.

You can have an unlimited number of different mobile forms on the Mobile Plan and can send & reveive as many as you wish of each during the current 30 day License period.

Yes.

Form Layouts are built in MS Word as a template using tables, headers and footers. This means virtually anyone who knows Word can build form Layouts. Layouts can include company logos, addresses, contact details and unique consecutive form numbering.

Company branding to match the layout and content of your current forms can be met.

Once a form is submitted from the mobile app the data is sent to the pro-Forms^® servers for processing. At this point the data from the form is added to what ever Layouts have been created and added against that form.

Layouts for the form can generated as MS Word, PDF, ODT, txt, RTF, csv, XML, JSON, html.

Layouts in whatever the specified formats are for that form containing the data submitted from the mobile device can then be sent by several methods to people, locations or systems.

A form can have more than one Layout format specified with each one being sent to a different location e.g. a PDF copy sent to the Customer by email, a Word copy to the office placed in OneDrive and a csv file emailed to the office accounts department.

The system is able to send completed Layout formats (PDF, Word csv etc) to people, systems and locations using the following methods : email, FTP, SFTP, OneDrive, Dropbox, GoogleDrive, Sharepoint/ Teams, custom API.

These features are available in both the ESSENTIAL and PLUS versions :

YES

If image controls are added to a form it is possible to configure each of them to capture at one of 3 pre-set resolutions. This is useful when the subject nature of some photos requires greater detail/ clarity than others.

YES

When in the form BUILD option you can specify which fields are to be stored in an encypted format. Please bear in mind that any on-screen analysis and reporting within the system cannot display encrypted data for obvious security reasons.

Encrypted fields can be used on both custom Mobile and Online forms.

The current price can be found HERE. Office/ admin staff are FREE and you can vary your License numbers each month. There is no minimum lock-in period beyond the current 30 days. To see a full list of what the Plan includes please click here

In addition, the Plan also covers :

Don't also forget - you only pay per month for the number of field workers using the mobile app. There is NO charge for office staff accessing the Work Group for admin purposes.

YES.

The system has been designed for multiple admin staff to access and manage field worker activities. Staff can be given different access permissions to manage different types of work or field workers to prevent accidental duplication or changing of planned jobs e.g. one member of staff could look after 'new installs' work and another 'breakdowns and call-outs'.

YES.

Using the visual planner, simply drag an allocated job from one field worker to another to reallocate it. This will automatically remove the job from the mobile device of the original field worker and add it to the device of the newly allocated worker.

There are a couple of ways of know what is going on with jobs and the location of field workers throughout the day.

Firstly, as field workers update the status of each job from their mobile app the Work Group used by office staff will change the status colour of each job and update started and completed times automatically.

Secondly, it is possible to set each the status of each field worker's account to collect and send the GPS location of their activities whilst using the mobile app. This could simply be a snapshot of their location when submitting a form or alternatively a continuous stream of locations showing their travel between locations on a map.

YES

You can add Customers either one at a time or by using a wizard driven bulk import from an Excel file. Each Customer you add can also have muliple sites logged against them. Jobs can be quickly raised and recorded against each Customer location/ site. All sites can have specific contact details and notes saved against them which are passed to field workers when jobs are raised and dispatched.

YES

Thanks to the ability for adding custom fields we are able to ensure each Work Group matches the needs of our Customers. Custom fields can be added to collect and store specific Customer/ site, job or user information. Hopefully this means you will not have to compromise or change your current business processes.