You are a service-based business. You are unique and have carved out a niche inside the industry. Your brand is trying to stand apart from the competition. You are doing things in ways your competitors are not.

Or perhaps, they are doing things in ways you want, and you need to replicate their success for yourself.

Whichever the case, forms could support and reinforce these goals. A custom form might be just what helps your business create these competitive advantages.

We've worked with many businesses where a custom form has done just that - successfully lifting them head and shoulders above their competitors. Professional customer-facing reports embedded with photos, checklists, recommendations, and proof of results being delivered. Emailed to the customer's inbox before leaving site.

It sets you apart, drives customer re-engagement, repeat business, and revenue growth. It's a wow factor.

ServiceM8 Forms are super powerful and functional. However, they can have limitations. Here are the main ones -

1. They are designed to have questions answered in a sequence, one question at a time. You start by answering the first question, then the second, and so on. You can forward and back one question at a time but some workflows won't find this ideal, especially if you often jump between different parts of your form while filling it in.

2. ServiceM8 Forms are intended to be started and finished (finalised) as a single event executed by one person. This is ideal for jobs where you are executing a specific procedure, like an inspection. However, if your workflow requires different questions within the form to be completed by different people over an extended time-frame like hours or days, then ServiceM8 Forms will not work for you. A very common example of this is Safe Work Method Statements (SWMS) that require signing off by different staff over several days.

3. ServiceM8 Forms have limited ability for modification after they have been completed. Which might become an issue if your workflow requires modifying options or answers afterwards. ServiceM8 Forms will allow modifications to free-text fields, but not for any other fields types such multi-choice questions, photos, or signatures. 

The easiest way to determine if your existing form is suitable for ServiceM8 is to get in touch with us and we'll help you make that assessment.

This is a tough question, and the answer is (sorry) it depends.

Almost anyone can build a simple form in ServiceM8. They are relatively easy to create, perhaps a couple of hours up to a half a day.

But some forms can be very complex, and these may require substantial development time. Simply put, the more questions, conditional logic, and field codes needed for the form, the more time, effort, and cost is involved.

Not everybody is a designer. It requires skill and artistic creativity. Building a very complex form can also take programming and coding levels of expertise. And it's not just about the number of pages in a form. For example, we helped create a form that only needed to output a couple of pages, yet it needed over 700 conditional form questions in addition to 1000 nested field codes embedded into the Word template document. Easily 40 to 50 hours of effort.

This is the most common question, and often the most difficult to answer. Expect a basic custom form to start at $250 plus any applicable taxes, which equates to about 30 questions/answers with a bit conditional logic and a simple document template for the output. 

At the other end, highly complex forms with 100 to 200+ questions can easily take several days or weeks, and cost somewhere between several hundred to several thousands of dollars. 

We assess if a form is worth this kind of investment by running it through the desirability/feasibility/viability test, followed by a price/ quality/speed test (pick any two from that last list). If a form request passes these tests we may agree to building it. If not, we will tell you - because it won't be worth the investment for you or your business.

Yes, and you can find these in the ServiceM8 Form Store.

Pre-made forms can make sense because while they usually sit at the complex end of the development effort, they can also be much more cost effective as opposed to having a custom one-off form developed. This is because our initial investment to build them are being recouped every time one is bought.

If we believe your form will have a broader appeal to a larger market, we may well invest the effort to build it at a greatly discounted rate knowing we will recoup our costs in the future.

You can purchase our forms in the ServiceM8 Form store. Use your desktop browser to open your ServiceM8 Dashboard, then go Settings > Forms > Form Store.