Forms
Forms is the intake side of client work: build a questionnaire once as a template, send it to a client, and collect their answers. Clients fill it in from their portal or from a shared link. They don't need a Bitment account for a link.
Use it for onboarding questionnaires, annual update requests, and anything else where you need structured answers back from a client rather than an email thread.
Where to find it
Open Forms from the dock, or Data › Forms from inside a client.
Key concepts
- Template. The reusable question set you build once (sections, fields, and
their settings).
- Form. The actual thing you send, created from a template for one or more
recipients. Each recipient's copy is tracked separately.
- Recipient. Who a form was sent to. Recipients can span clients, colleagues,
referral partners, and people added ad hoc, so a form isn't limited to one client.
- Section. A step within a form or template. Long forms are broken into several.
- Field. One question, of 17 available types (including a searchable US-state
picker).
Build a template
- Open Forms and go to Templates.
- The builder has three parts: sections, the fields within the selected
section, and the settings for the selected field.
- Add sections to break a long form into steps, add fields into a section, then
configure each field: label, type, help text, and whether it's required. A field can be shown or hidden conditionally based on an earlier answer.
- If you operate more than one firm, label the template with the firm it belongs to
(or leave it personal). This is a label for organizing your template library, not a sharing setting.
On a phone the builder becomes a Build | Setup pair, with field settings in a bottom sheet, so every authoring action is reachable by touch.
Every new firm starts with a ready-made Starter Onboarding template covering a broad range of field types, so you have something to send on day one.
Send a form and track responses
- From the templates library, create a form from a template for one or more
recipients, using the recipient picker to search across your firm's people.
- If an unrecognized email is addressed, choose which firm (when you operate more
than one) to file that new client under.
- Send it. The recipient sees it in their portal, and you can also share a link.
The app tracks each form's state (sent, in progress, completed) and collects responses as they come in, so you can watch percent-complete as a recipient fills it out. You can rescind a form you've sent, pulling it back so it's no longer visible to the recipient, reopen a rescinded or completed one, or delete a form outright.
Responses
Open a sent form to see its answers as they're filled in, live. A completed form also drops a generated PDF of the answers into the recipient's client file space.
Client portal fill experience
A recipient reaches a form the same way they reach a signature request: through the client portal if they're signed in, or through the shared public link if not. The fill experience walks them through your sections one at a time, saving progress as they go, so they can leave and come back without losing answers. Once submitted, a form's answers are locked. Reopen it from your side if you need the recipient to amend something.
The AI panel
The robot toggle in the app header opens an AI panel scoped to the form you're working on. It can list your forms and templates, read a form's answers, create a form from a template, send it, rescind it, or delete it, with those changes staged for your approval. Authoring the questions themselves stays a manual task; the AI works from a template you've already built.
Tips
- Use Preview as Client in the builder to try the fill experience yourself before
sending. It's a sandbox, so nothing you type there is saved.
- A partial autosave on the recipient picker or the field editor never loses the
other one's state. The two save independently.