Submitting an entry

An entry is one filled-in copy of a form.

Finding the form

Submissions in the sidebar. Unlike the rest of the menu this is assembled from your organisation's own templates, so what you see is what has been built. Entries sit under the department that owns the template.

Filling one in

1. Open the form and choose to add an entry.
2. Set the date — the period the entry is about, which is not necessarily today. Where the form records by shift, set the slot too.
3. Fill the sections in.
   • A section linked to a tracker group opens as a table with a row per item.
   • Computed fields fill themselves in as you type.
   • Mirror fields on a dynamic form are read-only and already current.
4. Sign, if the form asks for a signature.
5. Save draft while you are still working, or Submit when it is done.

The date is the period, never the filing time

Everything downstream orders entries by the period they cover, not by when they were typed. A backdated entry filed today therefore cannot present itself as the most recent — which is what makes catching up on a week of paperwork safe.

In a repeating section, the control that adds another row sits after the last one as well as in the section header, so adding a fifth row does not mean scrolling back past the four you just filled in. The new row is scrolled into view and its first field focused, ready to type.

You do not need a connection. A form filed with no signal is queued on the device and sent when there is one. See Working offline.

You can fill a form from a spreadsheet rather than typing it, including one workbook covering a whole period. See Filling a form from a spreadsheet.

Draft versus submitted

	Draft	Submitted
Visible to others	Yes	Yes
Publishes its readings	No	Yes
Counts in a balance	Not by default	Yes, once approved
Editable	Freely	Within the edit window — see Correcting a submission
Can be approved	No	Yes

A draft is a document in progress. It is not a private scratchpad — other people can see it, and where a form is raised from another an open draft is flagged so nobody files a duplicate.

Approval

Where the form requires it, a submitted entry waits to be approved.

• With a flat count, any authorised approver can sign until the count is met.
• With an approval order, each stage opens only once the one before it is complete.
• Somebody who signed an earlier stage cannot sign a later one, unless the form allows it.
• An unnamed stage can only be approved by the account holder.

An entry with an unpublished correction cannot be approved

If somebody has saved a correction to a submitted entry without publishing it, approval is refused until it is published or discarded. This applies to the account holder too — it is about what a signature would mean, not about authority. See Correcting a submission.

What happens when you submit

• The entry is given its document number, if the form issues them. See Entry numbering.
• Fields linked to a monitored parameter publish their readings against the item on the row. Those readings are what dashboards, charts, tiles and period summaries read.
• Any alert rules on its fields are evaluated, and anybody they name is told.
• Any balance the form feeds is recalculated, and its alert rules are evaluated.

Alerts are best-effort by design: nothing about an alert can fail the entry that triggered it.

Live mode on a dynamic form

A dynamic form does not work this way. It is one continuously-updated document:

• There is no Save button. Your edits are saved automatically as you make them.
• Mirror fields are always current — they re-read whenever the underlying reading changes, without a refresh.
• Capture Snapshot freezes what the document says right now, with a reason, as a permanent record. The list of past records is titled Snapshots and carries that reason as a column.

Snapshots are immutable. They can be deleted, not edited.

If the form does not do what you expect

What you see	Why
A section opens empty when you expected the item list	The section is raised from another form, so it waits to be told which document it answers.
A field is read-only	It is a computed field, or a mirror field on a dynamic form.
A dropdown is empty	Whatever it references does not exist yet, or has been deleted.
The form refuses a second entry	One entry per item per period is on for that form.
A required field will not let you submit	Save it as a draft instead; the required check is skipped on drafts.
A success message mentions values that were not written	Another entry already holds those slots for that date. Check for a duplicate entry on the same date.