Forms let your clients send you structured requests from their portal: a staffing order, a cleaning job, a service call, a document request. You design the form once; clients fill it in under Requests in their portal, and every submission lands in your Requests queue with an email to you and a confirmation to the client.
Before you start
- Enterprise plan with Custom Forms turned on.
- To open Forms you need the Manage Forms permission. Owner and Administrator have it. Team members who only work the queue need View Requests and Update Requests instead; see Work the requests queue.
- Clients must have a portal account to send requests. See Invite clients to your portal.
Create a form
- Open Forms from the sidebar and click New form.
- Under Start from, pick a template or Blank form:
- Staffing / cleaning request: service type, number of staff, start and end date, start and end time, urgency, site and comments.
- General request: subject, details, needed-by date and an attachment.
- Give it a Name (clients see it) and click Create and open builder.
The form is created as a draft. Clients do not see drafts.
Add and arrange fields
In the builder, the left column lists the fields; the right side edits the selected one.
- Add field offers ten types: short text, long text, number, date, time, dropdown (one choice), checkboxes (several choices), yes/no, file upload, and site / location.
- Drag a field by its handle, or use the arrows, to reorder. The trash icon removes it.
- Every field has a Label, an optional Help text shown under it, and a Required box.
- Dropdowns, checkboxes and sites take one option per line.
- Site / location is a dropdown of your locations as your team names them (for example each dining hall or building). Enter them one per line.
- Number fields can have a minimum and maximum. File fields allow 1 to 5 files each, up to 25MB per file, 10 files per request; attachments are stored in File Exchange under the category Requests and linked to the request.
A form can have up to 50 fields.
Notifications and confirmation
Under Notifications and confirmation:
- Email new requests to: one address per line. Leave it empty to email the owner and every Administrator. Each request sends one email per address, and the delivery of each one is tracked on the request.
- Confirmation message to the client: shown on screen after they send the request and repeated in their confirmation email.
Save and publish
- Save draft stores your changes. Nothing changes for clients yet.
- Publish makes the form appear on your clients' Requests page. Each publish creates a new version; the version number shows next to the status.
- Unpublish hides the form from clients. Requests already sent are kept.
- Archive retires a form you no longer use; Restore brings it back as a draft. A form with no requests can be deleted; one with requests can only be archived.
Change a published form
Edit the draft and click Publish changes. The new version is what clients see from then on. Requests sent on earlier versions keep showing exactly the fields they were sent with.
Two rules keep old requests readable:
- A published field keeps its internal key when you rename, move or edit it, so its past answers stay attached.
- A published field cannot change type. To turn a text field into a dropdown, remove it and add a new one.
History lists every version with its publish date and who published it.