How to Use Mobile Forms
Paper is slowing your business down and wasting money. When paperwork is completed on a site away from the office, it needs to find it’s way back so that it can be processed and the data used. Office employees need to wait for this information before they can take the next step to complete a job report, invoice a customer, or give a manager an update on a project.
Processes take longer to complete when data isn’t available in real-time. Mobile forms provide a solution.
Paper is a Problem Because:
- The average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper a year
- Large organizations lose one document every 12 seconds
- U.S. companies spend $120 billion each year printing forms
- A company’s paper consumption grows an average of 22% each year, doubling costs every 3.3 years
Why You Should Make Your Process Mobile
Using mobile forms saves time by collecting and sending data where it needs to go in one step. You can plan out work for the week more accurately when you know what projects your techs have completed as they finish them, instead of waiting for their report at the end of the day. Think, too, of the administrative hours you could save by not needing to re-enter data from a form once it comes to the office. Plus, manual data entry increases the potential for human error.
An electronic filing system also keeps documentation accessible. If you need to find compliance paperwork from a project last year for an audit, you don’t want to waste time trying to find where it was filed.
Mobile forms allow you to pre-populate information on a form and to make fields required. That way, technicians in the field always have the information they need for a job, and the office won’t be stuck searching for answers when an incomplete form is submitted.
Setting Up Your Mobile Forms
Once you’ve decided to start implementing mobile data collection, you’ll want to create mobile forms for tablets and smartphones. You will need to actually build your forms so that they can then be completed on a mobile device.
Step 1.
First, choose the process that you want to digitize and identify the paper forms that need to be converted into a mobile version.
Step 2.
Then it’s time to start building. Add in fields to match the equivalent questions and sections on your paperwork. This might include a date field for when the form was completed and a supervisor signature field at the bottom.
You can even include fields for images right in the form, instead of needing to take and attach photos separately.
With the Device Magic Form Builder Preview, you’ll be able to see exactly what your forms will look like on a device, so you can optimize as you create the form.
Step 3.
Once you’ve built your form, the next step is to set up where you need it to go. Do you just need to email a PDF copy of a report to a manager in the office? Do you want to add data to an Excel spreadsheet? Or maybe your form needs to be stored in an internal database or tool.
Device Magic has integrations built with Cloud storage such as Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox, communication tools like Evernote and Podio, as well as SQL, Salesforce, and others. You can use these integrations to set up the destination for your mobile forms submissions, as well as customize the format data will arrive in.
Step 4.
After you’ve built your form and set up the destination for submission data, it’s time to test it out, and then repeat the process with the other forms you want to digitize.