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What the product tracks is not all you track, and the order a form asks questions in is not fixed either. Form studio is where both are decided — for every record type at once, one form at a time.

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The canvas is the form

This isn’t a list of fields with two arrow buttons on each. The middle of the screen is the record’s own form, drawn the way it will actually be drawn — the same controls a create dialog and an edit screen use, frozen so you can arrange them. Drag a field to move it, or pick it up with a click and choose a slot; both work, because a drag can’t be done from a keyboard or reliably on a touchscreen.
The product’s own columns are on the canvas too, and they move the same way a custom field does. A work order’s title, an asset’s serial number — where they sit on the form is yours to arrange, even though what they hold is the product’s, not yours to redefine.
Fields live in sections. The product’s own sections come first, then any you’ve added, then a pile of fields in no section at all — that’s the order the record screen draws in, so it’s the order the canvas offers to drop into.

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Choose the record type

Every tenant-scoped record type in the product has its own form: work orders, assets, parts, vendors, technicians, and the rest. Switch between them from the top of the screen — or open the studio straight from a record’s own edit icon or its quick-create dialog, which lands you on that record’s form already.

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The types

Two of these are signatures on purpose, not a duplicate. A drawn signature is strokes captured on screen, and it’s the only one that can print on a generated document. The other files an image as evidence — retained, scanned, captured offline, and counted against a job’s requirements. Which one you want depends on what happens next, not on what a signature looks like.
Files, photographs and controlled documents can hold more than one answer — a part can carry several photographs, a job several signed-off documents. Everything else holds one.
A field’s type can’t be changed once it’s created, for the same reason as before: the type decides which column an answer is stored in, and changing it would orphan a year of answers rather than convert them. Create a new field and retire the old one if you have it wrong.

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When it’s asked

A field doesn’t have to be asked unconditionally. Add a condition and it reads this record’s other answers — its own custom fields and the product’s columns — to decide: A field hidden by one of these is never required at the same time — nobody can be blocked by answering a question they can’t see.

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Dates

A date or date-and-time field can refuse a backdated answer, a future one, or both — two independent toggles, off by default. Useful for a completion date that shouldn’t be typed in next month, or a date of birth that shouldn’t be typed in next year.

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Who sees it, who answers it

Two separate controls, and they don’t work the same way:
  • Who may answer it is a grant list. Left alone, everybody who can see the record can see and answer the field. Tick a role and the field narrows to the roles you’ve ticked — the first tick takes it away from everyone else.
  • Hidden from is a deny list, and works the other way round. Ticking a role hides the field from that role only; everybody else keeps seeing it regardless of what the grant list says.
For one of the product’s own columns, only “who may answer it” is offered, and it only controls the form. A register, an export or a report reads that column directly, and hiding it here would lock a door with no wall around it — so the screen says so rather than pretending to lock one.

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Required

Tick Required and the field must be answered before the record can be saved — and, on a work order, before the job can be closed. A required custom field also appears on the field app under “before you can close this,” with a count, so a technician can’t finish without it.
Every required field is something somebody must type at the machine, possibly in the rain. It’s an easy control to overuse.

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Where a custom field applies

A tenant field doesn’t have to appear on every record of its type. Scope it to a site, to a type or category, or to one specific record — an asset template’s oil-change interval only needs to appear on assets that get oil changes.

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Where numbers come from

A record’s own number — its asset number, its work order number — isn’t set here. See Numbering for how those are generated, and Import for bringing in fields and records in bulk instead of one at a time.

Numbering

Formats, resets and per-site or per-category sequences for every record type that gets its own number.