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What a form is
A form is a document your organisation files: a delivery note, a job card, a shift sheet, a requisition. It is the "counting the paperwork" half of the two ways of knowing something.
Two words to keep apart:
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Template | The blank form. What fields it has, who signs it, what it links to. Built once. |
| Entry | One filled-in copy of it. Filed by somebody, on a date, about some items. |
You build a template. Everybody else files entries against it.
What a form is made of
Sections. A form is divided into sections, each holding fields. A section can be linked to a tracker group, which is what turns it into a table with one row per item — a delivery note listing every product, a shift sheet listing every machine.
Fields. Each field captures one thing. The field types are covered in Building a template.
A department. A template belongs to a department, and its entries are reached through it.
Signatures and approvals. A form can require signing, and can name an approval order — who signs, in what sequence.
What a form does beyond being a record
This is the part that makes forms worth building rather than just filing.
- Fields can write readings. A field linked to a monitored parameter publishes its figure against the item on the row, so filing the document is recording the reading. Nobody does it twice.
- Forms feed balances. Name two forms — one that adds and one that takes — and Trackapt nets them per item and tells you what is left.
- Forms can point at each other. A reference field links a delivery to the requisition it answers, and the link survives a rename because what is stored is the id.
- Fields can compute. See Computed columns.
- Fields can alert. A rule over a field's value can raise a marker on the form, a chat message, a push or an email — and the marker travels onto the printed copy. See Alerts on a form.
- Entries can be numbered.
INV-000001, per form. See Entry numbering. - A form can be filled in a spreadsheet. Download it, fill it in offline, upload it back. See Filling a form from a spreadsheet.
Two kinds of form
Almost everything in this section is about the standard form: a template, and many entries filed against it over time.
There is a second kind, dynamic, which is shaped differently and worth understanding before you build one.
| Standard form | Dynamic form | |
|---|---|---|
| What exists | Many entries, one per period | One live document, continuously updated |
| Submitting | Files an entry | Takes a snapshot of the live document |
| Are past records editable? | Within the edit window | No — snapshots are frozen |
| Fields can mirror a reading | No | Yes — read-only, always the latest |
| Can carry values forward | Yes | No — there is no previous entry to carry from |
| Recording cadence | Periodic | Non-periodic |
A dynamic form is the right shape for a live board — a control-room sheet that is always current and gets photographed at intervals. A standard form is the right shape for anything that is a document about a period.
A dynamic form's snapshots are immutable
They can be deleted, but not edited. Since the live document holds the current truth and the snapshot holds what it said at a moment, editing a snapshot would mean changing what the board said in the past.
Where forms appear
- Submissions in the sidebar, built from your templates and nested under the department that owns each one.
- The form builder, reached from a template.
- The dashboard, through the Form Submission widget.
- Reports and period summaries.