Table of Contents
Episode Summary
Join host Zach Malloch and his guests Bryan Gillilan and Dylan Greer as they talk about Forms in RecTrac. New as of 3.1.10.15 and with a lot of exciting potential, dip your toes into one of the newest offerings from Vermont Systems.
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch
It is very nice with the extra backup vocals from what I can only assume to be somebody's headset. Welcome, everybody. RecChat. We have a very exciting one today and we have some special guests. A very special guest. Here are two very special guests, Brian and Dylan. Everybody else is just normal, average, everyday RecChat group here, which is of course exceptional. But we are here to discuss a brand new piece of RecTrac. Well, new to you, perhaps, or maybe you didn't even know that you already had it. We're going to go through all of that. But I'm trying to get to the things that Brett usually says, which is pay attention down at the bottom, there's a little Q&A button, so if you have any questions you want to ask us, ask them right there and we'll be able to track them and make sure Bryan answers all of them before we ever let him go.
And we can also just have you guys chat if you want to. Actually, I should probably make sure that that's allowed for everybody to chat with everybody it is now. So if you just have some comments, you can throw them in there. This will be a session where we're going to be looking for some of your feedback and ideas and suggestions. So feel free to just let fly when you have those. That being said, Bryan does have a very thorough demonstration of what we're going to be talking about today. So there's a good chance that some questions will be answered and we'll have some time at the end for specific follow ups. But the topic in question is RecTrac forms, and I assume that's kind of like, you know, rental form and facility reservation forms. Is that right Bryan? What are RecTrac forms?
Bryan GIllilan
Not exactly. We'll talk a little bit about what RecTrac forms are here today. So really what we're trying to solve for our customers is anything that currently is accepted as a paper form where somebody has to manually fill something out, supply it to you, and then you potentially have to take some action with that form, whether it's it's got to get an approval and then there's some business process that happens after the fact. Or maybe you just need, hey, we've got this thing on record for you now. We're good. So we're trying to solve that use case and not have to have our customers go to external sources like Google Docs or Google Forms or Microsoft forms and really be able to do that in the RecTrac application where the data is now available to you to report on alongside all your other household data. And it's something we can kind of interact with. And you have that customer in context as opposed to some external third party application forms.
Zach Malloch
I mean, it sounds awesome. Can you show us what that looks like?
Bryan Gillilan
Yes, I can. Let me start sharing my screen here. Maybe...
Zach Malloch
I'll also just mention Dylan is here from Sales. He's got some good news for us a little bit later on in the session here.
Bryan Gillilan
All right. We should be sharing now. All right. So everybody can see our Anytown WebTrac site here. So the way customers are going to be able to get to forums and to see an example of one is forms are like every other item that you guys have in your RecTrac application. They can be found on WebTrac, through a search or through a direct link from your municipal or park district website. So I've got just a quick little online forms here in my menu that I can go to to view forms. And notice this search looks a lot like every other search in WebTrac in terms of customers, are going to have the ability to drill down to specific types of forms you might offer. In our case here in our sample, we've got a scholarship application form and a residency verification form.
We could have multiple scholarship application forms for different scholarships if we wanted to. Those could all fall under that scholarship application type, potentially. Ultimately, this is what a customer's going to see when they go to fill out a form. Or if you wanted to put a link directly to a specific form on your municipal site or on your splash page, you can do that as well and direct customers straight into this form submission page. So we'll take a look at this scholarship application form as an example, because I'm logged into my household account on WebTrac, my application form is pre filling with my email address and name from my household. If I was logged in as a guest, I would have to supply this information. Again, the key here is these forms are designed to help automate workflows for you where we know we need to have a person in context, a member of your community.
These forms aren't really designed to be surveys and things of that nature that are anonymous. They're really designed to be something that allows you to engage with your community at a level to accept information from them and then do something with it once. So I've got my household info pre-filled here. This particular form has some kind of basic applicant info. So this scholarship application, we want to know what family member in the household this scholarship is wanted for. So we're going to go ahead and choose Adelaide here. We want to know what kind of programs Adelaide's interested in participating in and maybe it's camp based programs or full day child care programs or whatever the case is. We're asking for some additional information. We want to know your total household income to see if you qualify for this particular scholarship and may be part of the decision making we have there is the number of family members under the age of 15 in the household.
So again, this is just kind of an example form. I could have a spot where customers can give any additional information they want related to their form submission, and we can also expose them the ability to upload files with their form. So if I want to get a photo of this particular applicant to have on record for some other reason, I can do that. I can go ahead and upload that photo and all the forms submissions all have reCAPTCHA built in to ensure we're kind of secure with all these form submissions. But this is essentially what a form can look like. I'll pause there for a second Zach.
Zach Malloch
How long do you want to pause for Bryan?
Bryan Gillilan
I'm going to pause for a second. So I think the real key here is, of course, if people have questions, this is an example form. This is one we built. You guys are obviously going to have your own use cases for forms and want to build your own types of forms and questions. So I think it leads kind of nicely into, okay, this is a form, great, you can submit it. My forms don't look anything like that. How do I build my form in the system, which kind of ties over into the like, backside of things.
Zach Malloch
I've got two questions. One, Tracey's asking, is it customizable? and Scotts asking, How did you set it up?
Bryan Gillilan
Yeah, so here we go. So first thing we're gonna talk about is RecTrac form management, and then we'll backtrack into some some setup things that you got to do before that, but when we jump into RecTrac form management. This is just a menu item in your RecTrac Menu. Form management is where you kind of create and update individual forms that patrons can fill out. So if we go look at this scholarship form we were just looking at here, this is a standard RecTrac management program. So all your standard kind of management functionality. Here on the form is where I define what type of form this is. Give it a description that's going to show up on the web. I get to assign a workflow code associated with this form, which we're going to come back to in a minute.
I get to define the success message code for this form. And so where this comes into play, the success message code is on completion of my form submission. This gives us the ability to put some custom messaging on the WebTrac screen that kind of says, Hey, you successfully submitted this form, here are the next steps and really be able to inform that patron or that community member that submitted what they should expect to happen from here and allow that to be unique for every form that you might accept. Because those what's next may be different based on the form that was submitted. So this gives you the ability to customize a message there. Standard comment code functionality across RecTrac. So these are just comments in the system. You can define them, you can put in the messaging and so on. Permissions are associated with forms as well. So if you only want certain users in your system to have access to certain forms, you can set permissions on them.
And then you also get to choose what forms to show up in your WebTrac form search. And where this really comes into play is if you are using forms in RecTrac for your WebTrac Contact Us capability. So on WebTrac we have our contact us. There is the ability now through your web parameters profile to use forms for your contact us. So that your contact us actually prompts with some different form options so you can collect specific information from your customers when they're trying to contact you. If you're using that method, there's a very good possibility you don't want those contact us forms to also show on your generic form search on the web. So here I just want to see form. Somebody wants to submit not necessarily the contact us side of things.
So in form management, this show in WebTrac form search is something you would probably turn off for your contact us forms so they don't show on that search screen. And then some basic info here, some dates. So if you have a form that you only want to be available on the web to submit for a certain duration, you can plug some dates in around when that form should show up online for customers to fill out.
So that's the kind of basics of the kind of parent form record. But then we get into the details of how we actually built the form itself. So forms in RecTrac are made up of three different field types. Headers, so when we talk about headers, if we jump over and come back into our scholarship form here, here is the header, applicant information, that's the basic header. We have instructional text, so (I should probably show) when you go to add a header, it's just header text, you just define it there. That's all same thing with instructional text, you get an editor box to define your instructional text for your field. Again on the web. Here's an example of some instructional text and then you have questions.
And the great part about forms is they leverage existing RecTrac question functionality. So if you know how to build questions for activities or facilities, you know how to build a question for a form. So if I wanted to add a new field to this form, for example, I wanted to capture something other than just the member photos I can go to add new field. I want to add a question and I get a full list of all of the RecTrac form type questions in my database. I can reuse questions across forms. So if I have the same question that I might ask for on three different forms that I have, it only has to get created at one time as a question in the system and I can reuse that.
So then from here, if I wanted to add a new question, I can do that pretty easily by just doing that question And this is standard question update logic. So nothing new here in terms of how to build a question and add a question. So all the same functionality you have in RecTrac everywhere else, including the ability to say a question is required or not. So pretty easy process to add a new field to a form. If we wanted to just do a new one here, we'll say we're going to add a sample option list question to this form. And in this case, we want the field type to be a combo box so people get to choose their options and we want to give them option one, option two and option three.
So I can go ahead and do that. And we want them to allow them to select more than one option let's say. I can save my question record, select that is what I'm adding to my form. There it is. I come back to the web and I refresh this form submission page. I now have a sample list question, and I have multiple options to choose from when I complete that. So real time. The other cool thing about forms is when you're in the form update screen, if you don't want to have to browse out a WebTrac to see if this thing's really available or if you want to hide it for now, until you're done building the form and it's really what you want, you can plug some dates in on it that don't make it visible on the web yet, or have this toggle off for showing it on the web.
And then you can just do the preview in WenTrac from here. And even if this form is not set up to be viewable on the Web, the preview still works. You get the form in a preview mode and you're able to validate your form, what it's going to look like to a patron just without the submit button and the submit capability. So it's really just your ability to vet out your form design and make sure things look the way you want them to look on the form. So pretty cool little functionality there, kind of built right into RecTrac. You can also. Okay, I really want this sample option list question to be up higher in the form. I can just simply select it and move it up multiple positions to where I want it to live. Maybe I want it to live above the total family income. I can do that and preview my changes, make sure everything looks good and there it is above my total family income. So pretty simple process in terms of how you actually manage and build the form itself. I'll pause Zach, We had any other questions out there?
Zach Malloch
We have a lot of questions coming in. I think some of them are better to kind of wait until a little bit later on, but we definitely have some stuff coming out. Well, you're definitely going to get to some of this.
Bryan Gillilan
All right.
Zach Malloch
I guess the next big piece of this is and I think this demonstration will answer some questions and of course, bring a raised even more. But so now you've built your form, you got it on the Web and people are starting to fill it out. What now?
Bryan Gillilan
All right. So what now? So the first thing is we just went out and filled out and submitted a scholarship form online. I'm going to go ahead and we're going to go submit another form. We're going to submit a residency form as well, just so everybody can see that form submission process also. So in this case, I'm going to say, no, we're not going to use the voter registration verification for mine. I'm going to upload some proof of residency documentation here with my utility bill and with my voter registration card. And I'm not a robot and I'm going to go ahead and submit that. So one of the things I want to call out here during this process, there we go. So notice I've got a custom success message here that my verification form has been received, our staff reviews these weekly and we make a final determination and I'll get notified when they're done and my status has been updated. So that's cool. So well, how does the staff know that that needs to happen? How does the staff know that? I just submitted a form, so we're going to kind of bounce back and forth between some email here and some RecTrac configuration.
So we talked about coming back to this form workflow. So in addition to form management in RecTrac, you're going to have form workflow management in RecTrac. This is where you define the workflows that your form submissions are going to process through. So in the example of our scholarship form that we talked about, we've got kind of a 3/4 step workflow in the system as new scholarship requests come in, we go to this change workflow so everybody can see it really all of workflow code is, is what's the description of the workflow, what's the initial status You want a form to take when it gets submitted from the web and then do you want to display the transition steps for this form? When somebody views their status online? We're going to come back to that in a minute. But with that form workflow, we get to define the transitions. So the steps that those forms are going to go through as they're processed. So we can see here transition number one on this particular form is a new transition.
So as everything comes in, this one gets built automatically. They're going to come into a status of new. And if I go to change transition on this, we have some options of what we can do here with a new form submission. Right now, I have nothing special happening. These are just going to come in as new and I've potentially got somebody monitoring the form dashboard in RecTrac that we're going to talk about reviewing these on a daily basis. But I could have an action that happens here when a form gets submitted. So if we bounce out of this scholarship form and go look at our residency approval form, we've got a little bit different of a workflow still three, four steps. But if we go look at this transition on the residency submission, we've got a staff notification trigger on this transition and we've got a couple staff members selected.
This is just a RecTrac user pick list of all my staff members. So we've got a couple staff members selected and we've got some staff notification text. So this is something I'm able to build out in the system. I'm going to send these to users. When somebody submits a form, they are going to get this email with some info about the person or household who submitted the form with our residency rules as a reminder to them. And their role in the organization is to review these requests potentially. So they're going to get an email any time a new request comes in that says, Hey, there's a new request, here's some details. You need to go review this in RecTrac. So that's a transition trigger. So right now we have kind of four primary transition triggers that folks will get value out of.
One is a staff notification trigger, which is just what this is. You choose a staff member, you tell it what you want it to send them. Another is a patron notification trigger, which we'll talk about in a second. A third is an alternate notification trigger. And this is really for if you have someone that needs to be aware of an application or a form submission, but maybe they don't actually do anything with it directly, they just should have some awareness to it that it got approved or that it got submitted. This gives you the ability to plug in an email address for a user that's not a RecTrac user. So if somebody at your city council or a park district board needed to be aware of certain requests when they get to a certain status, this allows you to plug their email in here, plug in some notification text with some info about the household, and that can automatically happen as part of that transition.
And then the last one is an assignment trigger. So similar to the staff notification trigger. This trigger allows you to select a RecTrac user, but only one because the form can only be assigned to one user at a time. And we'll send a notification to that user that they've been assigned a form for review. So this would really be going back to the WebTrac contact us conversation. If you're using forms for contact us. You may have all of your programing forms. If somebody has got a question about programs you offer, they may go to a program coordinator versus if somebody is having a technical issue or somebody has got a question about your facilities, those might go to another user. So this workflow gives you the ability to assign those forms to the users who are responsible for responding to those inquiries, whereas the staff notification is purely used to notify staff. There's no actual assignment that takes place with that one. And I'm not going to get into the WebTrac review notification here today, but we'll have an upcoming RecChat later in 2023 where we talk a little bit about the web track review notifications and what that's going to open up for us.
So Transition Trigger again defines kind of what status this thing can go to and from what other status. So we just looked at the new the new transition. Well, from new, we're going to have a staff member start reviewing this form and that's the next step in the process. So the next transition I've created allows for a form submission or residency verification to go from new to staff review as a status. These statuses are just system codes. So there is a new system code type in system code management for form status. And this is what's going to display when we go to transition this form is what these. So if a form is currently new, it can go to staff review as the next step in the workflow. And when that happens, in this case, a patron is going to get an email notification that we are now reviewing their form.
And in that email they're going to get a cool little piece of a info that we're going to show here real quick. So next we've got the approved step and then potentially a rejected if we're going to reject a particular form or request. So form workflow management is really where forms kind of come to life in that you get to define the workflow. The status is who gets notified when a form transitions from one status to the next and what those possible transitions are. It's a pretty cool process there in terms of how that all takes place and how customizable it is and this is where we're going to be looking for feedback from customers. When we look at all these form transition triggers, is this trigger action is a place where we can start implementing business rules that help automate processes in RecTrac for you all.
So, the scholarship application form is a good example of a place where one of our thoughts is being able to have a scholarship assignment trigger action where when you approve a scholarship approval form, we automatically prompt you for family member in the household Scholarship code, an amount that you want to assign. And as part of that approval trigger, you're able to fill in those fields and RecTrac automatically goes out and associates that scholarship to the household and handles all of that aspect of the kind of process. Similarly, we are currently working on a direct activity enrollment trigger action so that when a particular form is submitted and approved, it allows us to automatically enroll a family member into a particular program. So if you have travel sports programs that folks have to try out for and have to submit an application for can solve that use case and allow for that kind of direct enrollment to happen.
So that's certainly something that we are actively kind of seeking customer feedback on. What business automation can we accomplish for you with forms by adding some new trigger actions that allow the process of approving a form to perform a transaction in RecTrac and stage some data for you? So that said, where do staff actually interact with these forms is probably a question some folks have. So we've seen the management side, we've seen how a customer can submit, but what happens to a staff member? So I'm a staff member, I just got this residency verification update. This is telling me I've got a new form submission and here's all the details about the household that submitted the form. And so this was my staff notification email that I just got.
So I'm a staff member. I just got an email that lets me know I have a new form I got to go update. And this is all customizable and configure well as you saw on that trigger action. So now I got this. I need to go on RecTrac and review that. Where do I do it? So there is a another new menu item for the form dashboard that everyone will have access to. In the form dashboard is your one stop shop for interacting with form submissions across your organization. And this is where the power of data grids in RecTrac can really help you kind of organize and navigate form submissions, especially if you're a customer that's potentially going to utilize this functionality for a lot of use cases. So right out of the gate, I've got a couple of data grid templates built to just target my residency verification forms and my scholarship application review forms.
Now you notice when I come in here by default, this is just kind of every form submission that I've ever had in my database and no real great organization other than they're sorted by form type and ID. So if I wanted to have a view that is, hey, I want to see my residency verification forms and I want them sorted by the current status of the form, I can create a template that groups all their records by their work, current workflow status and shows me where everything is. So right now I've got two residency verification forms submitted, one's in a new status, one's already in the staff review status. So if I take this new status record, here's all the things that I can do with it from the dashboard. First thing I can do. If I wanted to assign this to a staff member for review, I can do that.
It's going to let me choose a user, plug in some assignment text, and that user is going to get an email letting them know they have a new item assigned to them. I can view the history of a form, so if this is something that's been through a couple of steps, I can view the history of it. It'll tell me all those steps that went through who did it when they did it, so I can have that full traceable ability on the form itself. I can print the form if I really want to. And this is just going to kind of give us a flat pdf of the form information. I can transition this form to a new step and I can view or edit the form right from here as well. So here's the print out version. Not incredibly pretty, but we give you some standard form information in terms of the form ID, the date and time that was submitted, its current status, the patron's email address, household and name.
And then we give you kind of all your instructional text, your headers, answers to questions that they gave for file uploads. We simply give you the actual file name of those things because we can't actually just have that be a part of the printed form necessarily. That's kind of the print option. There's also a view edit option here. So if you're not somebody that wants to print a PDF or save a PDF, you can just go to view edit form right here, gives you RecTrac access to the full form, access to view and download any files that were up updated on the form and gives you access to essentially do everything you can do from that little data grid sidebar. There you can do directly from this form as well from the actual form detail screen and that so transition is kind of the next thing. So if I was going to move this form from new, I've reviewed it. I kind of looked at their documents. Everything looks good. Now I want to transition this to staff review. That's the next step in the workflow. So that's what it's going to default me to is staff review and I'm going to go ahead and process that. Now I've got two forms in staff review. I'll pause for a quick sec.
Zach Malloch
Yeah, just because we're getting to 2:30 already, time is flying as we talk about RecTrac forms, I know that some people might have only blocked off that half hour. So if you have to drop off, that's totally fine. But I was wondering if we might want to let Dylan give his little piece of information here before we have people drop off. And of course, we're going to keep going and we're recording every question that came in. So even if we don't get to your question before the end of this session, we're recording it. We're going to paste it in with all the other RecTrac archived RecChat archives by the end of the day tomorrow. And yeah, so anybody that needs the drop off, go ahead and feel free. But if you're okay with it Bryan?
Bryan Gillilan
Yeah, go ahead.
Zach Malloch
There's a question that's come up Dylan, a couple of people are curious how much were forms cost?
Dylan Greer
Yeah, so this is always a great question. And they brought me in and I got the best answer for everyone and it's free, so you should have access to it As long as you are on one of the later versions, you will have access to it and you are welcome to use that any time there's no additional cost. So great news there, Great added benefit.
Zach Malloch
Absolutely. And just also just a real quick summation and then I'm going to give this back to Bryan. But if you don't have form management because you've customized your menus, if you go to menu management, you can just search in your available fields. I'm just going to share my screen just for a second Bryan, right over here. We'll share that. Hopefully you guys can all see the screen. So I'm just in menu management and I'm just going to jump into one of my default menus. And so I already have this filter down. All I have to do is type in form and then hit tab or enter. And so all of the form related stuff is right here and just real quick to knock another question off the list. If I add forms to my favorites or let's actually say dashboards, this was the one that was particularly asked about somebody said, can I have this just be in front of people when they log in. You can actually do that with any menu item in RecTrac. It's this option that says auto open. If you toggle that on and whenever anybody assigns this menu group logs into RecTrac, it will just automatically launch that program and it'll be there kind of instead of there, the home page with all your shortcut buttons. I just wanted to share that real quick if anybody does need to drop off. Thank you so much for your attendance. And like I said, we're going to keep going. Back to you Bryan.
Bryan Gillilan
Thank you, Zach. And thank you, Dylan. All right. So jumping back in here, so we just transitioned a form from new to staff review. And if we remember, we look at this residency approval workflow, this new to staff review has that patron notification trigger action. So I'm going to jump back into my email here, into my inbox as the patron and I just got this new email as a patron that has some important information for me. I've got this form id that I submitted. This is an update to let me know there's been a status change on my form and here's the text I had it in my particular form email letting me know what that status change means, and then all patron notification emails come with this view form status link and what this new form status link is going to do (and we'll let it open in a new tab) is it's going to take me to WebTrac to show me the current status of my form submission.
Now this is a really simple version of this status review and that all I see in the status information is here's the status it's currently at. Staff Review. We do have an option in RecTrac on your workflow, to display transition steps on the WebTrac status page, and what this does when I make that change is if I come back and refresh my form status update, I actually get kind of more the full view of what are all of the steps this form submission is going to go through and where am I at now kind of view. So if you do have something that's a lengthy, multi-step process and you want to provide insight to the end user as to exactly where their submission is in that process, this gives you the ability to do that, but you may have certain ones where you just want to give them their current status. You don't want them to see all the steps potentially so we do allow for you to make that distinction on that form /Status Update.
In addition to that, if somebody wants to go see the forms they've submitted in the past because they want to get a value off there, they don't remember what they did under their my account. There is now a form history there where I can go review all of my existing form submissions by date and I can click on a link for that and go view what I actually submitted for a form. Currently, this does not allow an end user to update an existing form submission. So the idea here is they've already submitted their form. You guys have potentially already started reviewing it or finished reviewing it. There really isn't the ability for them to go update the form. This is definitely something we're looking for feedback from customers on once things get out in the field to understand is there a desire that maybe the form should be editable up until it hits a certain transition status in the workflow or that kind of thing?
Or is there a need for you to be able to open a form back up for a patron to fill out some information on? So that's certainly something we're open to customer feedback on and definitely willing to kind of make some updates there as we see what the use cases are in the field. Jumping back to the form dashboard. So we were able to transition this form. It's now here in this staff review process. Again, transitioning is a really simple process. I can do it from here, I can do it from the view edit, form, screen. And if we look at it from the view edit screen, it's really just I've got some controls, I got a hide here, but I can just transition same process as before. I'm going to approve this particular one that's going to go ahead and move it into the approved status. Now those are approved. If I wanted to hide all my approved statuses on my list, I could just limit this down to staff review and new and I can see that as a template. So I'm not constantly seeing all my approvals.
You kind of have full control over what you see here. If I'm a user that just always wants to come in and see my own stuff, I could have my filter to just my records that are assigned to me and I can save that as a template as well to just look at the stuff that's assigned to have that be my default view, which this is a great opportunity to talk about data grids and the ability to create templates for your data grid that change kind of what's visible, what's grouped, and the ability that I can save this and I can set this as default template. So I'm somebody that always does residency verification. I can take that template I built, set that as my default template. This is user specific. And now any time I open the form dashboard, I'm getting that residency verification as my default view and then I can go to my templates and choose another view if I needed too. So pretty quick capability there in terms of doing that kind of thing.
Now if we don't have any questions, I can answer immediately on this. Zach I would love to tease some what's coming down the road here in the February timeline for okay, great. I have this form submission from a patron. Let's say it's a residency verification form. Before I can approve this, I need them to upload or send me a new proof of residency document because maybe one of the ones they included on their form doesn't include their address. How do I communicate with that person to actually tell them they need to provide me with that info? So one of the things and you guys won't see this yet today in your databases, but one thing that's coming is this ability to message directly from the form dashboard. So if I need to message Brian and find out some more information before I can move his form through, I can hit this message button.
It's going to take us to a new RecTrac message center and start a new draft message to Bryan, linked to that form submission. And I can say, (Meredith is actually the principal on this) so that I can say, Hey, Meredith, we need you to update or... all right. So I want to get that and I can go ahead and send that message to Meredith and Meredith on her side is going to get an email. This is not the email. Hold on a second. It's coming. Essentially, what's going to happen to Meredith is she's going to get an email on her side that says you have a new message to review in the message center. And that email is going to include a link back to WebTrac and Meredith and her message center. If I refresh this page on WebTrac is going to have a new message in the message center and the message center is a two way communication. So Meredith can see she's got a new message here. She can review that message. And hey, Meredith, we need you to update your voter registration info. Got it attached And Meredith can respond with her attached new voter registration file. She's not a robot. She can send that back.
And now on the RecTrac side of the house, this refreshes. I can't remember the exact timing, but it's not real time. But it's near real time. On the RecTrac side of the house, I'm going to actually get a notification via email and potentially a RecTrac notification to let me know I have a new message in the message center. This will take a second, but in a moment here on my RecTrac side of the house, we're actually going to see a little number pop up in a badge on this message center icon to let me know that I have a new message, but I need to respond to in the message center. So it does take a minute. There is a scheduled process that kind of updates this badge. So we'll wait for that to fire off here. Here is the message that Meredith got. So you have a new message to read. And this again, is customizable text that you guys can control. But ultimately there's going to be a link in that that will take you to WebTrac.
And I'm already logged in. So it took me here. But let me get here and get to my message center by default. So that's something we're currently working on, kind of building out the full functionality there in the message center to allow for that bidirectional communication and forms is going to the first place you guys see that get implemented in the product. I say the first place because we have plans to implement this message center throughout the product and by throughout the product, household management, household inquiry, global sales, purchase history, potentially anywhere you might have a question or need to communicate directly with a single patron regarding something with their household or a transaction in their history, you'll have ability to go through the message center, send a message.
That way they'll receive it in their message center and be able to respond to it all without having to go into external email, keeping all this content right in the RecTrac application so your staff never have to leave. And so that there's transparency across staff members. If somebody has to go on leave and someone else has to come pick up this form submission, they'll have access to see all that message history for the form submission and from your forum dashboard if you need to or from your message center. If you're reviewing this message and you need to jump to the form dashboard real quickly, We know this message is associated with a form submission. We'll give you a link right here to jump back to the form dashboard so you can go review that particular form submission and so on. So that's the concept behind the message center that's coming with RecTrac forms again will be free, will not cost you a penny. And that's all coming along for the ride here, likely in February for the message center.
Zach Malloch
Which I imagine would be a good time for some more RecChats about this. You're asking for questions and feedback and suggestions, Bryan, And I think people have been doing an excellent job with that over here. And are you ready for a couple?
Bryan GIllilan
I'm ready for a couple.
Zach Malloch
I think something that would help a lot, that's come up over and over and over again, can a form be a part of an activity registration or a rental?
Bryan Gillilan
So that is absolutely something we are trying to engage with customers and get feedback on. So for those that have questions or that have asked that question, we will be sending out a follow up to this RecChat, trying to put together some groups of customers to have some more in-depth focus groups around forms with to understand which business processes we can help automate. And certainly one place we contemplated adding forms is into the registration workflow. So in lieu of having a question set, you could potentially link a form to a program and that form becomes part of the registration process. I will throw out there. One caveat to that is we're very conscious about how long it takes people to add to Cart on the web and introducing more steps to getting an item in the cart is not necessarily something we want to advocate for, especially during high volume registration events. So that's certainly something where we're kind of in the process of figuring out how could this fit into the add to CART process for patrons and I think before somebody asks it, one of the other things we're thinking of doing with forms is adding them as criteria for rules. So if you needed to have a particular form approved on file before you can make a facility reservation, before you can register for a particular program, being able to add that as a prerequisite for registration.
Zach Malloch
And just a real quick thing, one of the questions that came out is, is there any documentation or a topic doc for this? I just posted a link to our current topic doc into chat. So anybody that wants to access that can get to it, that will work for at least a while. The help juice update, I think everybody probably saw in the most recent notification has been delayed, but this is up and running and live and help in Help Juice right now. This focus is primarily on the WebTrac Contact US, which is the first application of forms that we put into RecTrac. We'll be expanding upon that to include a lot of the stuff that's been discussed in this class or in this in this session here. Let's see plenty of other questions to choose from for this. Bryan, I don't know if you want to look through and just see if there's anything that you really want. Oh, Kim had an easy one. Can you add a spot for docu sign to the forms at the moment for capturing signatures?
Bryan Gillilan
So that is on our roadmap. That is something that's coming very soon is a new field type. So we've got headers, we've got text, we've got questions. One of the field types we're going to be adding to forms is signatures, and that will be very similar to the digital signature capture we did for waivers in that we will likely have a kind of combo field that requires you to enter a name and then digitally sign directly in the form as well. So yes, that's definitely something that's coming with forms.
Zach Malloch
And you answered a couple of these, Oh, is there a bulk way to download / print / save as a PDF completed forms are all selected forms from the dashboard.
Bryan Gillilan
There is not currently a bulk way to do other than multi select print form, which when you do this method, it is going to create a separate PDF document for each form that you print. So if I were to to do a multi select here and print and preview my forms, it's going to go ahead and process those. I will get to individual previews, one for each form. So those are my two forms I filled out. So I do get both of those previews. One thing that we haven't touched on is reporting on form submissions and I think we will likely have another RecChat here at some point and maybe even January on kind of the ways in which you can leverage our custom reporting capability to report on forms.
Really quickly, If we look at the form submission listing a report we do come out of the box with two default report outputs for forms one that is just simply a submission listing and one that is a submission listing with placeholders. For those that aren't aware. What placeholders are is they are essentially columns in a report that you get to choose what field you want to include in that column. When you run the report. So if I was running this report for my residency verification forms and I wanted to go ahead and process that, I've got placeholders here. I can say, okay, in this particular column, I want to add the answer to the voter registration question so I can go ahead and add a field in this column that is available.
I can add question Answer one. I'm getting a little in depth here, but for those that are aware the question, answer fields allow you to basically add a field to a report, and then on that field, choose a specific question that you want to get the answer to in that column. So in this case, I'm going to go ahead and choose my... (I got to remember what my voter registration was.) And we're actually talking about moving this to a pick list as well. So we have a bit more filter capability here. But let's just say what was one of my questions that was, would you like to do All right, jump back there.
Zach Malloch
I think that actually ties directly into somebody else's question or can you query an external database for getting some of the answers for this?
Bryan Gillilan
So not currently, but definitely something we're kind of in the process of looking through. So this voter registration residency request form is actually something we're currently in the process of trying to find a solution for customers that do have a voter registration database that indicates someone is a resident and they want to be able to hit an API in that application to verify residency. They'd like to be able to use the forms as a way to take in all these requests and then be able to pull out all the people that said they want to use the voter registration to prove residency. Okay, let's go ahead and API for them and get back whether or not they're a resident and then we can update from there and potentially a topic for another RecChat, potentially even leverage a RecTrac API to update their residency automatically from that voter registration system.
But really the key here being I can go ahead and add that question answer at real time when I run this report and process it, that's going to go ahead and get me that particular answer on that report because of the placeholder, I could have changed a label on that as well. And then next time I run this report, if I wanted a different value, I can choose a different placeholder field. So instead of question, I can go ahead and remove that. And maybe on this one, I want to get some information about the household, like their address or something like that. I could I get to choose what placeholder selection fields I want to add to the report? And then if I wanted more of those than just three, I could clone or copy our default with placeholders and I could build my own version.
Or maybe I get rid of some of our default columns and add more placeholders or add some more fixed question, answer values to the report itself. And so all that, all that stuff that you just saw there in terms of the ability to do that on a fixed one, we can also do on a custom form submission report where we're now going to start from scratch with what we had for the VSI form listing. Here's all the fields on there. Well, I want to report that specific to residency, so I don't care if the form types on there. I don't care if the form codes on there. I know these are all residency forms. They want the status. I do want the household, they want the name. Maybe I don't care about the email address, so we'll pull that off. But I always want, for example, question Answer one here. I always want this. And I was just playing around with this, so I always want question answer one to be the use voter registration Every time I run this... so I can do that, same as I could do it on the fly. I can select the question here is my voter registration question.
And now that is always going to be that setting when I run this report. So if I jump back out here now, I've got a custom form submission report that I can process that has that setting already pre filled into it and I still have placeholders I can use to add additional fields so you can have full power of what question answers you want to get on a report for this particular form submission and you can tailor multiple reports for different type of forms that you select to get the data that's valuable to you.
Zach Malloch
So a couple other use case ideas so somebody wants to know, let me see if I can find it. Yeah. Scott I was curious if this could be used at some point for installment billing authorizations.
Bryan Gillilan
That is an interesting use case that we haven't thought of on this end. So certainly something we could consider in the future. We'd have to kind of look a little deeper at what the mechanics of that actually are for those installment billing authorizations. But definitely something we could consider for sure.
Zach Malloch
Sort of similar to that new use case that I hadn't heard of being discussed yet. So could this interact with any sort of fees or payment processor like let's say the form is required to submit a permit application for a facility before you even get to to renting a facility? Maybe there's an admin fee or something like that.
Bryan Gillilan
So a fee for actually taking in the form. Is that, is that the kind of use case question.
Zach Malloch
Seems like yeah. To create a type of parks permit where a user can make a credit card payment.
Bryan Gillilan
We don't currently have any plans for that with forms specifically, but that's definitely something that is not out of the question. The way in which forms was created could potentially allow for that, I think we would probably lean more in the path though, of creating some automation workflows that would allow you to submit a form that then triggers a facility reservation through an automation workflow or a service item purchased through an automation workflow that charges the fee to the household on a certain status of the form request. But definitely something we'd love to hear more about in terms of the use case and how we could potentially use this to solve that use case. I think again, that could go right back to implementing forms as part of the add to CART workflow. Something as simple as a permit request could potentially be done with a service item in RecTrac with a form as part of the registration process for that service item.
Zach Malloch
Absolutely. Scott was wondering also, is this going to be accessible via Global sales or household inquiry or will we always have to go to the form dashboard to check it out versus the customer's account?
Bryan Gillilan
Yeah, as of now, it's all the form dashboard. We definitely have plans to add this to household inquiry, household management, the ability to get to a customer's form, submissions from there. Currently no plans to add anything and global sales for this. And that kind of aligns with the fact that there's no plans currently to add charging fees and anything along those lines associated with the form submissions. So to be determined on that one, I think I guess, but definitely plans to add household management, household inquiry functionality for forms.
Zach Malloch
And so you had asked about allowing customers to update forms once they've been submitted and use case that Joel brought up. (How's it going Joel?) was asking about... So when they rent storage areas, they need to provide insurance for the items stored in those insurance areas and that needs to be updated every year or so. So being able to upload new proof of insurance to an existing form would be the example there.
Bryan Gillilan
Sure. Yep.
Zach Malloch
And actually sort of similar to that would be can they pre fill previous answers for questions or for a form? So you're updating your summer camp stuff. What's changed since last year rather than fill all this out again?
Bryan Gillilan
Yeah, that is definitely something that we are currently ideating on, kind of taking a previous form with the same questions and being able to kind of pre fill your current form with those questions. One of the things we've got to kind of figure out on that structure on our side is how do we compartmentalize forms to a year or to a season, to a to a registration kind of period so that we know that this form is no longer valid. One of the things we haven't built yet, though we have plans to build, is kind of expirations for approved forms because that's likely the next question is a residency verification form as an example. This thing is good for a calendar year and then you've got to re-up it again next year potentially. How do we kind of account for that? So, I think, along with accounting for that kind of expiration of a form approval, we will likely be tackling that kind of can I use my last year's form to fill this year form?
Zach Malloch
And so John is asking about whether data on the form can be masked for security. So not necessarily exactly which which side of this I would assume on because, you know, the customer would have to be filling in that information. But then is there some information that only some people would be able to see? And we have permissions on the form, but maybe this is talking a little bit more about permissions on the question level? John, Maybe you can give us a little bit more detail there?
Bryan Gillilan
Yeah, I think I can speak to that a little bit with where we are today and where we can potentially go. So we are kind of in the process. You can kind of see with some of the screenshots here of the form fields. We do have the ability to choose what fields on a form display on the web versus in RecTrac. We also are kind of in this process of, you know, where are they updatable? So is this field updatable? In what statuses is it updatable? One thing we haven't gotten to is do we need the ability to say this particular field is only visible to, you know, is there permissions on this particular field? If we can see it, we can access it outside of patron versus staff. As of now, the expectation is if you're a staff member that has access to a form submission, you have access to the entire form and we're not going to hide anything or redact anything. But that's certainly something. Again, customer feedback on that is very much welcomed. We want to make sure this solves the use cases, but also doesn't open up any security issues for customers in doing so.
Zach Malloch
All right. And we have a couple of questions that are a little bit on this line, but can the form query data already inside of RecTrac? And it seems like we can. When you were doing your example on the scholarship, you had a dropdown that was the people that were already in your household. You didn't have to fill that in. It knew it because you were logged into the system.
Bryan Gillilan
Yeah, that is actually something that's new with forms that we have implemented. And so when we say can it query data from the database, the answer is partially yes. So it all is based on kind the type of question you might want to add. So if I jump back here and we add a new question, We'll go ahead and add a new one from scratch to our form. So again, standard kind of question management here. So when we look at the kind of field type on a question, we have kind of standard fillings, checkboxes, combo boxes, etc. One of the new field types is this household family member field, which again does what you saw on that scholarship approval form. It basically pulls all of the family members in the household and puts them into a combo box so you can select which family member in the household you want to use as an answer on that question.
We also have all of the system code question types in the database. So anything that is a system code if it's an activity category and activity type, etc., those can all be exposed as options for answers. So if I wanted to add a question where the optional answers are activity categories, I can do that. And when I do that,(go ahead and save that. Add that to my form.) So now on this scholarship application form, I've got that activity categories of interest. I were to go fill that form out. My options here for that question are populated by the activity categories in my database. So options for having option lists and question answers be populated from data in the database. No options currently to have data in the database pre fill in answer to a question I guess is the key there. And that again, is something as we get deeper into forms and understand the use cases better and how customers are looking to leverage this from an automation standpoint, if there's areas where that becomes an obvious, hey, we need this certainly something we're more than willing to entertain trying to find the technical solution for.
Zach Malloch
All right. Well, I notice that we are now an hour into our half hour RecChat, and I have a question for you, Bryan. So of course, where we've got all of the questions that have come in here, we've got them. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to get to all of them, but we will give all of these questions over to Bryan at the end of this session, and I'm sure that he will be very interested in following up with some of you on them. Let's say somebody has an idea they think of in about 20 minutes or exactly 3 minutes after we stop this presentation. What's the best way for them to to get those ideas to us?
Bryan Gillilan
I think the best way to get those ideas to us is to send them directly to me at this point. And Zach, I think we can share my email out following the RecChat. But Bryang@vermontsystems.com (that's Bryan with a Y) and we are more than happy to take any suggestions and implement them into our kind of roadmap backlog or fund their process. And if you do have questions and you do reach out, don't be surprised if we reach back out here in the coming months to get a little more detail, maybe invite you and do some refinement sessions with our development teams as we kind of talk through some of these use cases going into 2023.
Zach Malloch
All right. I'm actually going to post Brian's email directly in the chat there. So anybody that wants that, he loves pictures of your cats and dogs and everything, but mostly form suggestion ideas. And like I said, I mean, the feedback on this, the interaction we've had, the fact that we went for an hour and still have so many people here has been I think we've got a live one here Bryan and as mentioned, we're definitely going to be coming back and revisiting this topic. There is the topic doc that's available that I posted that link for, so you can at least use that to get started. We're going to be working on some updates to that in the next couple of weeks and this whole presentation will be posted by tomorrow. Bret, can we say that that's pretty confident on that side?
Bret Alarcon
Yeah, I should be able to get that back tomorrow. Yes.
Zach Malloch
Awesome.
Bryan Gillilan
And Zach, I might just throw out here so we can get it included as part of the recording. When you get your update to 16 or even 15 because this became available in 15, if you don't see form submissions on your WebTrac menu and you want to add them in WebTrac menu management, these are all under your your Next-Gen default menu for the primary screen. In here, you will have similar to what Zach said before, if you look up form in your listing, you'll have a new group available for forms and a button for the actual form search here and really the syntax behind that. Just so folks can see it is the form search syntax is simply search dot html with a module of form.
So if you wanted to add this to your splash page, you can add it there. If you wanted to pass in a form type to a link from your splash page for specific form types, you can do that by passing in the type parameter into that form search option. And if you wanted to go directly to a particular form, you can also do that as well by just going to form HTML and passing in the form code. So a lot of options there for how to get your customers to these forms to submit them, whether it's through native WebTrac, kind of journey or whether it's through a direct link from your municipal site right to the form.
Zach Malloch
Maybe we can get that part via the direct links and pieces added to the topic Doc also for our holiday one stop shopping experience. Well, fantastically deep level of information about forms. Once again, the first of many coming here expect to see this topic pop up more than once in 2023. And I guess we could consider this just a little bit of an early Christmas present for everybody. All right, Dylan, frame it like that?
Dylan Greer
Totally, Yes.
Zach Malloch
All right. So happy holidays from Vermont Systems. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, Bryan, for everything you shared and Dylan, thanks for the good news. Brett, Julia, Seth, thank you for all of your dedication to helping with the questions and just absorbing this information and helping all of our customers all the time. We will have a virtual symposium next week, but this is the last one before some of the holidays get kicked off here for RecChat. So from all of us to all of you, thank you. Thank you so very much. And we will see you all soon.
Bryan GIllilan
Thank you, everybody. Thanks Zach