Signatures and consent

Chemical services, needling, anything with a patch test — at some point a client has to say "yes, I understand, go ahead", and you need that to still exist in eighteen months.

Build it out of acknowledgements

An acknowledgement is a tick against a sentence you supply. "I confirm I've had a patch test in the last 48 hours." One tap, and what's recorded is which sentence they confirmed, on which date, on their own form.

That's the field to build consent out of, and it works everywhere — on the client's phone before they arrive, and at the desk if you're filling it in with them.

A form set to Review & signature does ask for a signature — but it asks you. The approval box takes a typed name from whoever reads the submission, and says so on screen. That's a useful record of staff sign-off, and it is not the client's mark.

What actually makes it useful

A consent is only as good as the sentence above the tick. Three practical rules:

Say what you're consenting to, specifically. "Chemical services" is not consent to anything. "A permanent colour containing PPD, applied today, after a patch test on the 12th" is.

Keep it short enough to read. A wall of small print is legally weaker in spirit and practically ignored. If your consent form runs past a phone screen, the client scrolled to the bottom and tapped.

Ask at the right moment. Consent collected before the appointment, at home, where they can read it, is worth more than one collected with foils already in their hair — which is the other reason to build it from acknowledgements. They are the part a client can actually complete on their own phone.

RewireBox records consent; it doesn't tell you what consent to collect. That depends on where you trade, what you offer and your insurer, and it changes. If a treatment carries real risk, get the wording checked by someone qualified and then build the form around it.

Where it lives

Completed submissions sit with the client, reachable from their record. Not in a drawer, not in a separate system, not in the email of whoever was on shift.

That's the practical argument for doing this here rather than on paper. The moment you need to produce a consent is the moment somebody is asking a pointed question, and "it's in a folder somewhere" is not an answer. Finding it should take the length of one search.

Editing a template later doesn't rewrite what people already confirmed. Submissions are records of a moment, and a moment doesn't change because you improved the form afterwards.