Getting started with Forms

What Forms are for

Forms in Site Commander let you build your own checklists and data-capture sheets, then collect them back from the team. Where the rest of the system gives you fixed forms for things like Variations and Invoices, the Forms module lets you design exactly what you need — site inspection checklists, safety walks, handover sheets, RAMS, snagging lists, weekly reports, daily checks, anything that needs filling in.

You build the form once, publish it, and then your team fills it in from a phone or laptop on site. Each filled-in copy is called a submission — it has its own data, photos, signatures and timestamps.

When to use Forms

Reach for Forms whenever you find yourself thinking "we should be capturing this". Common examples:

• Daily site inspections — weather, hazards, deliveries, headcount
• Pre-start safety walks — quick yes/no checks on PPE, edge protection, exclusion zones
• RAMS sign-offs — confirming operatives have read the method statement before starting
• Plant and tool checks — pre-use inspections on excavators, scaffolds, lifting equipment
• Snagging sheets — capturing defects with photos and locations as you walk a job
• Handover forms — final sign-offs from the contractor and the client
• Toolbox talks — recording who attended and that they signed in
• Incident reports — capturing what happened, where, and who was involved
• Weekly progress reports — for sending up to head office or out to the client

If you're still doing any of those on paper, in a spreadsheet, or in a generic notes app, that's the moment to build a Form for it.

Where to find Forms

Forms turn up in two places, depending on whether you're focused on a single job or stepping back to see everything:

• Inside a project — open the project's sidebar and click Site Commander > Forms. You'll see only the forms linked to that project.
• Company-wide — open Forms from the main sidebar to see every form across every job, plus your reusable templates.

A single form can be linked to several projects, so it'll appear in each project's list as well as the company-wide list.

The lifecycle of a form

Every form moves through three stages, shown as a status badge in the list:

Once a form is published, the structure is locked to protect any submissions already in. To make changes safely, you create a new version — see Updating a published form for how that works.

Forms versus templates

There's one extra concept worth knowing about up front:

• A form is the real thing your team fills in. It's linked to one or more projects and collects submissions.
• A template is a reusable starting point. Build it once, then spin up new forms from it for each project that needs one.

Templates live in the Template Library and never receive submissions themselves. You'd typically build a "standard daily inspection" template once and roll it out to every new project as a fresh form, rather than rebuilding the same fields every time. See Reusing forms with templates for more.

A typical journey

Here's what setting up and running a form looks like end to end:

1. 1

   A site manager creates a new form (or starts from a template) and opens the Form Builder.

2. 2

   They drag fields onto the canvas — text, dates, dropdowns, photos, signatures — until the form captures everything they need.

3. 3

   They preview the form, sanity-check the layout, then change the status to Published.

4. 4

   They either let operatives fill it in directly from the Forms list, request a submission from a specific person with a deadline, or print a QR code and stick it up in the site office.

5. 5

   Operatives fill in the form on a phone or laptop. Their submission lands back in the Submissions list, ready to view, share, or report on.

What you can build

The Forms module gives you a lot to work with:

• A drag-and-drop Form Builder with a wide range of field types — text, numbers, dates, dropdowns, signatures, photos, employee pickers, and more
• Conditional logic so fields appear or disappear based on what the user has answered
• Calculated fields for totals, averages and other automatic maths
• Multi-page forms for longer checklists, with each page checked separately as the user moves through
• Versioning so you can update a published form without breaking the historical record
• A Template Library for sharing forms across projects
• QR codes to give the team scan-and-go access from a phone
• Request Submission to assign a form to specific people with a deadline
• A Pending Submissions banner so anyone with work waiting can see it the moment they open the Forms list

Next steps

• Finding your way around the Forms list — for the main page and what every column means.
• Building your first form — to start a new form from scratch or from a template.
• Using the Form Builder — for the drag-and-drop editor.
• Reusing forms with templates — for the Template Library.