This Help Articles covers:

• Setting up your Templates - see Part 1

• Setting up your Report Settings - see Part 2

• The Ingoing/Outgoing inspection and reporting process - see below

This Help Article is aimed at account Administrators setting up the Inspections app for their ingoing inspections. 

 

For our comprehensive course on setting up your complete Inspections app account, including getting your team ready, setting up their profile, please spend some time going through our Inspections Setup Guide.

 

The basis of every Inspections workflow is two-fold, first perform an inspection and collect all your ratings, notes and photos onsite, then prepare a report from this collected data.

 

An inspection can be edited, a report can't.

 

If you need to make changes to a report you'll first need to go in and make changes to the inspection and then prepare another report.

 

With this background, and assuming you've setup your templates and report settings using the previous steps, let's look at the workflow for preparing perfect ingoing reports and their complementary outgoing reports.

 

Step 1: Performing the ingoing inspection

Very simply, the first step to preparing your ingoing condition reports is to perform an ingoing inspection.

 

Starting inspections is covered in these Help Articles on Starting Inspections.

 

Please note, the Inspections app isn't designed to have two inspectors editing the same inspection at the same time. For example, if you had a large property and you wanted to split the taking of photos and the writing of notes up, and have two property managers do one each. You will likely run into sync conflicts when the report gets uploaded and saved back by the two inspectors. It's best to avoid this workflow for now.

 

Important!
Make sure you get all of the layout right on the device you're performing the inspection on. Make sure you have all the rooms and items correct because if you end up editing any of the layout in the outgoing report, by adding rooms or items, you may run into trouble with the report not lining up your rooms for comparison.

 

Step 2: Completing the inspection

Once you've performed your inspection for your ingoing, it's likely you'll want to carefully go through the inspection and edit it to make sure it contains all the right notes to cover the current state of the property.

 

You can edit your notes and photos on the web if this is easier for you than on a device. Editing your inspections on the web is covered in this Help Article: Edit Inspections and Generate Reports on the Web

 

Important!
Like having two inspectors inspecting the same property at the same time, if you are editing your inspection on the web, watch out that you don't have the inspection open in both your browser and your device as this may also cause potential sync conflicts.

 

 

Step 3: Preparing the final ingoing report

Reports are the final, un-editable hardcopy of your ingoing inspection.

Your office may prepare reports in any number of ways:

• on the device and have the tenant sign while physically present with the inspector and the report is still on the device,

• as a Standard report which only displays one inspection but with all of the report settings you've selected.

• as a Move In style report which displays one inspection on the left-hand side of the report, and leaves room for the following Move Out inspection to be included later in the Move Out report.

All of these are acceptable and it's a matter of finding the right way of preparing reports which suits your office's workflow and which match the features in the Inspections app.

 

Step 4: Performing an outgoing inspection

When it comes time to perform a final outgoing inspection for your property, if you want the outgoing report to line up with the ingoing report, you have to make sure you're using the same template as the ingoing inspection, but you also have to make sure the layout of the inspection, all the rooms and items of the rooms are the exact same as the ingoing, otherwise there may be errors with the report not lining up.

 

On our iOS Inspections app the best way to make sure your inspection layout is all the same as the ingoing, use the Copy Previous Inspection feature which is discussed in this Help Article: Copying a Previous Inspection

 

Please remember when copying inspections there are Copy Options which let you choose whether to bring in the ingoing photos, ratings and notes.

 

Step 5: Preparing the outgoing report

When selecting Move Out style report in the Inspections app, it looks for the most recent Move In report for that property, with the same Template name, to tie the two together.

The outgoing reports process is covered in this Help Article: Comparison Reports

 

If you're having trouble with this make sure the date of the Move In report is before the Move Out report, if you're having issues you may need to prepare additional reports to get the dates to be in the correct sequence.

 

And that's it! That's the end of our series of Help Articles on using the Inspections app for ingoing and outgoing inspections.

 

If you need any further help to get setup or to talk through a problem you may be having, please don't hesitate to reach out to our Support team by submitting a request.