Electronic Business Forms

 

Create Custom Electronic Forms

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All companies fill out “forms” to track information.  The complexity of the “form” ranges from a paper form to using a word processing or spreadsheet program to using a software program written specifically for a company in order to capture user input and store it in a database.  The problem with paper form is obvious – you are limited in your analysis and backup.  Using common software such as a spreadsheet program allows better storage and analysis capabilities, but anyone can enter just about any information without limitation of the format of the data entered.  The problem with custom programs written specifically for a company are the cost and time required to modify, if even in a slight manner, the user inputs or reporting features.  This is where the Same Page System^TM provides its most important and fulfilling feature – creating electronic forms (we call them “tickets”) using the Ticket Builder application.

 

Creating tickets is easy.  Simply name your new ticket (for example, “Employee Evaluation Form”) and assign ownership of the ticket to the various SPS groups that use your system.  In this manner, only those groups that you wish to be able to create such tickets can access them.  For example, you may create a SPS group called “Human Resources” and place those users into the group that are able to perform employee evaluations.  Now, after creating a new ticket titled “Employee Evaluation Form”, you can assign ownership of that ticket only to those users found in the Human Resources group.

 

 

Now, add custom fields (a ticket simply consists of all custom fields) to create the electronic form. For example, for our “Employee Evaluation Form”, you may add a section titled “Evaluation History” in which you create user inputs to capture such information as “Last Evaluation Date”, “Evaluated By”, and “Rating” using the Attribute Builder for Tickets.

 

 

Now, the ticket created (and “triggered” by using the Ticket button from the Contact Manager) would look like the following.

 

 

 

Controlled Data Input Using Validation And Custom Controls

As can be seen with the example above, various types of information require different input fields.  This is a key difference between using a common spreadsheet program to produce “templates” for forms and using the SPS Ticket Builder.  For example, it is sometimes best to create a user input that contains choices in a drop-down menu (such as the “Evaluated By” field example) or provide a pop-up calendar to fill-in a date (as can be seen with the “Last Evaluation Date” field).

 

 

In this manner, data integrity remains intact no matter what the user attempts to enter into a field.  The SPS user-input screens created using the Attribute Builder programs provide the ability to add fields based on:

 

• Numbers - includes whole numbers, various decimal precision, social security numbers, and phone numbers
• Characters - limited by length of entry and special state and country drop-down menus
• Checkboxes - indicates fields with “yes/no” option
• Radio Buttons – used to choose only one out of a short list
• Menus – used to choose only one out of a longer list
• Dates – using a calendar pop-up or simply forcing the current date

 

 

 

 

Add Comments To Each Ticket

Besides providing the custom fields that can be filled-out under the Ticket tab, each ticket has the ability to capture free-form comments using the SP Editor.  The SP Editor provides the ability to enter comments in a formatted fashion (much like a word processing program) yet keeps all information in the system in html format so that if you wish to share the data on your website, you can do so with ease.

 

 

 

Ticket History Now Linked To Contact

After completing a ticket, the contact record for which the ticket was created keeps a running history which can be sorted based on ticket categories, status, and date.  The history can be found in the individual contact record under the Ticket tab.  Those users with the appropriate level of permissions may view or print these tickets.