Your Guide to Forms Automation

What is forms automation software?

Forms automation software involves tools used to digitize the forms creation and data collection process. This technology can be used in conjunction with different workflows such as:  

• Document automation & execution
• New hire onboarding
• Processes for new client/patient intake
• Service delivery management like intake and triage

What are the key features to look for in a form automation software?

When looking for the right tool that will properly serve your business needs, there are a variety of features to look out for. Below are the most common features that you can expect from a form automation software:

Benefits of using automated forms

Automated forms enables business users and clients to complete their workflows more quickly and accurately. Automated forms offer a variety of other benefits as well that help improve day-to-day activities for every area of an organization:  

1. Saves Time & Money – Forms automation reduces the manual work involved with data capture and management, freeing up the time and resources for employees to perform other, highly strategic tasks that bring value to the business.  

2. Elevates the Employee Experience – Forms automation improves the user experience in digitizing and fast-tracking the submission and processing of information.  

3. Increases Data Quality & Reduces Errors – Forms automation guarantees a standardized way to process information.  Setting up an automated system correctly ensure you can rely on consistent results every time.  

4. Measures Metrics & KPIs Faster – Form automation software helps compile the exact information you need to measure metrics and key performance indicators you have already set. By using automated forms, you get a streamlined process that gives you access to your data to make better business decisions.  

5. Improves Organization-Wide Compliance – When automating forms, information needed for compliance and auditing are already available for use. It allows you to visualize results and whilst keeping up to date on potential problems for them to be fixed  before they turn into a significant compliance issue.  

6. Promotes Internal Collaboration – Automating forms makes it so much easier to share information across departments within an organization. For example, with automating intake forms, the legal department can easily transfer legal documents to customer, or send a financial report to the accounting department.  

BPA Examples & how form automation fits into your organization

Risk & Compliance Processes – By leveraging forms automation, you can ensure that your risk and compliance teams can digitize and drive policy adoption and reduce risks by operationalizing policies and automating their workflows. Below are some examples of how for automation can be used in risk and compliance processes:  

• Compliance Assessments – Forms automation allows you to assess the compliance of data risk and security on new and existing systems, processes and business activities using template-based generation and conditional content.
• Security Incident Reports – Using automation, you can provide a single digital access point for business users to report any suspected data or security breaches, minimizing the time it takes for incident reporting.  
• Vendor Risk Assessment – Automating the manual interactions and security processes your compliance team deals with daily provides an intuitive, self-service tool for vendors and reduces the turnaround time for risk assessments.  

Legal Processes – Automated forms software help legal teams improve the access, value and speed of their services, removing any bottlenecks in the process. Below are some use-cases for forms automation in legal processes:

• Legal Intake & Triage – Business users and clients use form automation with intake and triage, as automated forms provide users with intuitive, self-service tools to access services, advice and FAQs for their respective business departments.  
• Automated Legal Advice – Automated forms empower business users with a digital, self-serve way to access legal advice tailored to their exact needs, and will even escalate an inquiry to the correct resource or lawyer.
• ‍Non-Disclosure Agreements - Automate non-disclosure agreements from information intake using forms, to drafting, negotiation & approvals, e-signature and obligations via document automation.
• Sales Agreements - Using the power of forms intake and document automation, legal teams can significantly reduce turnaround and generate sales proposals quickly and accurately through the initial collection of agreement details.
• Other Legal workflow processes: Our legal workflow automation software incorporates powerful forms that are further used to help collect insightful information to aid lawyers service their legal requests.

Finance & Tax Processes – Forms automation can increase the clarity and accessibility of your finance department’s services, making it easier to navigate essential forms while streamlining manual work. Below are some use-cases for how your finance and tax teams can use forms automation:  

• Financial Reports – Leveraging forms automation ensures quicker turnaround times for financial teams to collect data and generate reports with more accuracy, thus eliminating errors and ensuring compliance with accurate reports every time.  
• Expense Approvals – Through forms, users can submit an expense approval request, and receive automated summaries and audit trails of key considerations throughout their reports.

Procurement Processes – With form automation, you can transform your current procurement processes by delivering immediate, high visibility impact to your procurement processes & service delivery to drive business-wide strategic initiatives. Below are examples of forms automation use-cases that can be used in procurement processes:  

• Procure to Pay - Collect details relevant to the requested procurement and digitize procurement rules, assessments, and checklists to enable self-service and adoption through controls.
• Vendor Agreements – Forms automation allows you to automatically generate vendor agreements in just a matter of minutes through designated templates that facilitate negotiations and signing with ease.  
• Modern Slavery Risk Assessment – This process is streamlined through forms automation as you can easily assess suppliers against modern slavery standards and policies to arrive at a risk rating and overall compliance score.  

HR Processes – Forms automations can help reduce administrative burden by automating the generation capability of HR services and forms. Here are some use cases for forms automation in HR processes:  

• Employee Onboarding – Forms automation speeds up and improves the onboarding process for new employees by streamlining tasks for managers and HR teams. Forms automation allows managers to build tailored journeys for their new employees such as self-service tools for them to ask questions regarding their new position.  
• Employee Agreements – Automating your employee agreements ensures that you generate accurate contracts every time using standardized employee agreement templates.  
• Performance Reviews – Forms create a standardized performance review process that ensures accurate feedback collection for all employees and teams.  

Things to consider when choosing form automation software:

• Do the forms offer web & responsive mobile options? - A trademark of a good form automation software is that it allows its users to create forms from any device, including mobile.
• How customizable are the forms? - Form automation software should allow you to customize and brand your forms for your business.
• What’s the limitation of fields on the forms? - Ensuring that your platform allows you to include all the necessary fields you require to collect data based on the specific workflow is critical in choosing a platform.  
• What is the cost per user forms created & responses? - Some providers might charge different prices depending on the scope of work you are looking for. For example, some platforms are limited to 100 forms per months at a pricing of $100/month. Other vendors might charge a yearly fee for unlimited form responses. Researching prices and stacking vendors against one another can help decide which is the most cost effective solution for you and your team.  
• Are analytics & insights supported? - A forms automation software should streamline data capture through premade templates that initiate form workflows. Collecting data is an essential part of form generation, so making sure your software allows you to gain instant visibility and insights into your services and processes with data-driven decisions.
• What’s the level of workflow automation the form provides? - When choosing a software, having a platform that does more than just help users fill out a form can bring many benefits to your organization. For instance, a form automation software that helps with certain processes like intaking a legal request and using conditioning to triage to the necessary person can help to streamline an entire workflow journey.  Looking at the amount of automation you need will help your organization in the long run.  
• How safe is your data? - Ensuring that your automated forms platform is compliant and keeps client and user data safe should be a major consideration when looking for a software. Make sure that what you are considering can store and send information safely and is compliant with your organization’s security requirements.  
• What are the different types of integration/API capabilities of the form? - Integrations are the connectors between your forms and other services, such as Google, Dropbox and other services. With integrations, you can use your forms to connect with these services and further reduce your workloads. When researching platforms, check to see which integrations they provide and if they are compatible with your current systems.  

The Checkbox Difference

At Checkbox, we don’t just do form automation, but we support capabilities across an entire process or use case. We also provide a full suite of other capabilities that in one interface that extends into:  

• Document generation
• Workflow automation
• Review and approvals
• Decisioning and calculations
• Intake and triage
• And more

As the leading no-code, workflow automation platform, Checkbox empowers business functions to automate their tedious, manual processes and streamline their service delivery. Because Checkbox requires no technical knowledge and is truly no-code, this empowers business teams to enable digital transformation in a matter of days, not months.  

To get started, book a call with one of our technology consultants and figure out where you can get started on your no-code automation journey.

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