Custom Forms

Forms built the way software is built.

Most "custom forms" are a Word doc with a logo. Ours are a small product: scoped, designed, coded, tested. The result is the form that survives Friday afternoon, audit week, and the new starter who joined yesterday.

Pricing

Scoping first. No surprise invoices.

Form work always starts with the same scoping conversation. We don't quote in the dark.

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Form consult

$260 + GST AUD · up to 1 hour

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A working session over Zoom, for whatever the form work is. New build, fixing or extending an existing form, or a "should we even do this?" conversation: same consult, same hour. You walk out with a decision to build, or a clear next step when there isn't.

If it leads to a build

Custom form build

From $800 + GST scales with complexity

Price estimate after the consult. Simple forms land near the floor; the heavy ones (audit-grade inspections, multi-branch logic, regional compliance) land higher. You'll know which before we start.

Why custom

A form that fits the work, not the other way round.

The off-the-shelf forms in ServiceM8 cover the basics. The moment your work has conditional logic, branding requirements, or anything more than half a dozen fields, you'll feel the limits. A real custom form mirrors how the job actually runs: branching to the right questions, attaching the right photos, generating the right paperwork at the end.

We treat forms with product-development rigour. That means scoping the workflow before we open the form editor, designing the layout before we write the field codes, and testing on real jobs before you put it in front of a customer. A form is an interface. Interfaces deserve to be designed.

Recent work

What custom looks like.

A small selection of forms we've designed and shipped. ServiceM8 inside, your brand outside.

How we build

Five phases. No black boxes.

Every custom form we build moves through the same five phases. You see the work at every step.

WorkM8 form build process — five-stage horizontal flowchart: viability assessment, Q&A workflow, template graphic design, coding, testing

Viability

Should we even build this? Sometimes the answer's an off-the-shelf form, sometimes it's a third-party tool, sometimes it's no form at all. We figure that out before we write a quote.

Q&A workflow

Map the logic before the form. Who fills it in, when, on what device. What branches to what. Which fields drive downstream PDFs and which trigger automations. The output is a written spec, your runbook for what we're about to build.

Graphic design

Layout, brand, and PDF template. Forms are how customers see your business after the job's done. They should look like you, not like a Microsoft Word table from 2008.

Coding

Field codes, conditional logic, scoring rules, data flow into job notes, activity, and customer-facing PDFs. ServiceM8's form engine is more capable than most realise. We know its edges.

Testing & deployment

We run the form through the full job lifecycle on a sandbox tenant before we touch your live one. Edge cases, missing data, broken branches: all found and fixed before a single technician sees it.

Why it costs what it costs

A form is small software. It just looks like a form.

A simple form (half a dozen text fields, a signature, a photo, a date) takes us a couple of hours. Maybe half a day if the layout is fussy. That's not the kind of form most clients call us about.

The forms we get commissioned to build are the other kind. The largest we've built has over 700 conditional questions, around 1,000 nested field codes, and absorbed somewhere between 40 and 50 hours of work across the five phases above. It survives audit, it survives staff turnover, and it generates the customer report that closes the job.

Plumbing Inspection Report — full-page customer-facing PDF output with branded layout, multiple sections, photo evidence, and signatures
A live form output: Plumbing Inspection Report, branded and audit-ready. The customer sees this, not the form behind it.

We're upfront about this because we've seen what happens when a form is treated like a templating exercise: it gets built once, breaks twice, and quietly stops being used. Better to scope it properly, build it once, and have it last.

Worth knowing

Four things ServiceM8 forms don't do.

If one of these is a hard requirement, we'll point you at a better tool. Fillout or JotForm cover most of the gaps.

They're sequential.

Questions get answered in order. Great for one-pass procedures (inspections, sign-offs, report capture), wrong for free-roaming editorial review where the user wants to skip around.

They're single-session.

One person, one device, in one go. If your workflow needs to pause halfway and pick up next week (or have a second approver complete it), ServiceM8's form engine isn't built for that.

They're staff-only.

You can't send a ServiceM8 form to a customer to fill in. For customer-facing forms (booking requests, satisfaction surveys, intake), we wire in Fillout or JotForm and feed the answers back into the job.

Forms can't fix bad process.

If the workflow itself is broken, a form will bake the breakage in. Part of the scoping consult is checking the process holds up before we start designing the form around it.

Form store

Already in the ServiceM8 Form Store.

If your industry's a fit, there's a chance we've already built and published the form you need. Inside ServiceM8: Settings → Forms → Form Store, and search "WorkM8".

  • Advanced Job Safety Analysis
  • Advanced Photo Report
  • Air Conditioning Service Report
  • Home Electrical Safety Inspection
  • Plumbing Inspection Report
  • Solar Installers Safety Checklist (NSW)
Goes well with

Forms get sharper when they trigger automations.

A form that just collects answers is half a feature. The other half is what happens when it's submitted.

The same inspection form can flag a fail, generate a follow-up job, attach the failed photos to that new job, and email the customer their pass certificate, without anyone touching a keyboard. Form + automation is where the real time savings live.

See ServiceM8 Integration & Automation →

Talk through a form.

Book a free 30-minute call. We'll figure out whether what you've got in mind is a custom build or already in the Form Store, and what it'd take to make it real.