Send a form before the visit

Saturday's colour client has never been in before. You'd like her patch-test history and her medical form done before she arrives, not while she's sitting in reception filling in a clipboard.

Getting it to them

A form reaches a client as a link. They tap it, answer the questions and finish. No app, no account, no password — every one of those loses you a percentage of the forms you send.

Start from Forms → Submissions and create one: pick the client and the form. That creates their copy, which is what the link points at.

You can also fill one in with the client at the desk. That's the right move for someone who would rather tell you than type it, and for the client whose phone is a decade old.

What they see

The whole form on one page, sized for a phone, with anything you already know about them filled in. They scroll, answer, and press Submit.

Required questions carry a red star, and Submit stays greyed out until they're all answered — with a line underneath saying so, because a dead button with no explanation is how people give up. Save progress is beside it, so a half-finished form survives being interrupted, which is what most forms sent to a phone actually are.

Short text is a box, long text is a bigger box, a single choice is a dropdown and a multiple choice is a list of tick boxes.

The link itself is time-limited, on purpose — it carries someone's medical history. If a client comes back to it a fortnight later and it's gone, that isn't a fault. Send a fresh one.

Chasing

The submissions list is the chase list, and the status tells you which conversation to have:

• In progress — they started and stopped. Usually the form is too long, or they hit a question they couldn't answer from where they were standing.
• Completed — done. Nothing to do.
• Needs review — done, and waiting for somebody here to read it.

Those are three different problems. Someone who never opened the link needs a nudge. Someone who abandoned it halfway is telling you something about the form.

Timing

Send it when the appointment is booked, not the night before. A form that arrives with a booking confirmation feels like part of the process; the same form at 9pm the night before feels like homework.

And leave time to read what comes back. A medical history answered at midnight for a 9am colour appointment is a form that technically exists and practically didn't help.