Building a locked, form-driven system to generate compliance reports

​@Terry88 

Airtable’s forms don’t natively support any of the features that you’re looking for, so your #1 best bet for this is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable because it communicates directly with Airtable and can easily do everything that you requested.

Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to:

• create custom PDF files from a form submission
• perform math or other live calculations on your forms
• create new linked records on a form (you would use this for your repeating sections that you mentioned above)
• display Airtable lookup fields on forms
• update Airtable records using a form
• accept payments on forms
• pre-fetch dynamic data from an Airtable record
• customize the style and branding of your form
• customize a theme for your form
• create multi-page forms with conditional paths
• add a login page to your form
• collect signatures on a form
• connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously
• add CAPTCHAs to your form
• and much more.

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

• Using Fillout to update an existing Airtable record & create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
• Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

​@Terry88 

I should also mention that if you need more complex PDF files than the ones that Fillout offers for free, here are a few popular 3rd-party apps for automatically generating PDF documents from Airtable:

1. DocuMint
2. DocsAutomator
3. Typeflow
4. Make’s integrations — which can be integrated with any document-creation app of your choosing, which you can then convert to PDF. If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one way that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.
5. DocuPotion — I haven’t personally used this one yet, but I will be checking it out in the future.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Hm, if the people doing the data entry have Airtable accounts, I’d recommend designing an Interface for this where users can only create new records via Forms and cannot edit the data, which handles the following:

• Staff enter data via forms only 

• Users cannot edit layout or structure

• Supports repeating sections (multiple findings per report)

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For the calculations, if that’s an integral part of the form entry (i.e. users need to refer to the calculations in order to do more data entry), then you’d need to use a mix of Forms + normal data entry in Airtable I’m afraid, as Airtable Forms do not currently support displaying calculations on keyed in data.  If you’re just talking about doing calculations on the keyed in data for the reporting this is fine

For the PDF, there are a bunch of paid options and I’d recommend checking out DocsAutomator (www.docsautomator.co/).  Their free tier lets you try out the automated PDF generation triggered from Airtable, which’ll let you confirm it works for you before you go paid

If you’re not keen on paying for this, then you could explore Airtable’s Page Designer, but that’s manual process where you’ll have to save the PDF and reupload it.  Not sure if there are any free PDF generation services that are automated I’m afraid

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If the people doing the data entry don’t have Airtable accounts, then you could try Fillout (www.fillout.com/).  It has a free tier that does 1k submissions per month and can do PDF generation, and it handles the following:

• Staff enter data via forms only 

• Calculations happen automatically

• The report is generated as a branded, locked PDF

• Users cannot edit layout or structure

• Supports repeating sections (multiple findings per report)

The main worry is that the repeating sections bit might get clunky, and so I’d recommend throwing a form together and trying out the multiple findings bit to see how it feels

The idea would be to have a Reports table linked to a Findings table, and the form would be pointed at the Reports table, giving users the option to create multiple Findings records when they submit the form