This Help Articles covers:

• Setting up your Templates - see Part 1

• Setting up your Report Settings - see below

• The Ingoing/Outgoing inspection and reporting process - see Part 3

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 account, including getting your team ready, setting up their profile, please spend some time going through our Inspections Setup Guide.

Changing Report Settings Can Only Be Done On A New Report

Your report settings are the settings which add your business logo, business address, to reports as well as controlling thing like where your photos appear (either at end of the report as an Appendix, or below every room throughout the report).

This Help Article expands on some of our other support content if your setting up your account for ingoing inspections.

Please keep in mind while reading this, that you edit your Report Settings on your Inspections app only when creating brand new reports. If you've created a report and then want to go and edit your settings, you need to go back into an inspection and create another, new report by tapping either the '+' icon at the top right on our iOS app, or purple, floating action button at the bottom right in our Android app.

Step 1: Deciding Which Report Layout Your Office Will Use

As the Administrator of your account, you need to decide which report type matches your office's workflow. 

There are three report types:

Even though the 'Ingoing' layout is listed as one of these, you may want to use the 'Standard' layout which only displays one inspection in the report.

Why?

One reason our customers chose this report type for their ingoing inspections is because they only need to show one inspection on the final report. They print the initial ingoing report for signing by their tenant and at the end of a lease perform a quick, outgoing inspection on the same printed and signed ingoing report.

But, this may not match how you want to prepare your Inspections reports.

Lots of customers also use the other report types which leverage the features we've built into the Inspections app that let you compare two inspections side by side. These are our Ingoing and our Outgoing report types.

Important! The only way to get an ingoing inspection to appear on an outgoing report layout is to make sure it's been performed with the same template and has an earlier Ingoing report type prepared.

Please see this Help Article: Comparison Reports for more on this and if you still have questions reach out to us at support@happy.co

Setting Up Your Report Settings

Step 2: Header section of your report, make sure your business level details are setup correctly

Once you've settled on the report type, then you can customize how you'll make the reports look. 

Your logo and other items are included in the Customize Header section of your report settings. If you need to add a logo, or display your tenant or landlord details on your reports, these are all Header report settings and are discussed in this Help Article: Editing Reports: Customizing the Header of Your Reports

Please note, the photo of your unit or property on your final report, is neither a setting in your templates, nor your reports. This photo is at the unit level, you need to update your unit by editing it in our app. To see how to do that, please see this Help Article: Editing a Unit or Property

Pro-tip! If you have important paragraphs which need to be included at the very start of your reports, you can copy and paste them into the 'Business Address' field without a business logo to have them extend the full-width of the report, see below:

Chose whether your Report Header will look like this:

or more like this:

Step 3: Changing the look of your report, column-style reports

In most ingoing condition reports, customers seem to prefer to have their reports prepared in a column style which presents the report not in a text format but in columns with checkmarks in the column depending on what rating has been selected during the inspection.

These settings are managed in the Report Formatting group of report settings discussed in this Help Article: Editing Reports: Customizing the Formatting of Your Reports

As mentioned in the previous Help Article in Step 3 regarding your template rating set, a 'Tenant Agrees' checkbox and a column-style report setting let you have a place for your tenants to mark their acceptance of the condition of an inspection on a hard-copy report.

Step 4: Changing the look of your report, adding field for tenants to add their comments

Lots of ingoing condition reports need to include space for tenants to write their own comments about the condition of a property before they sign (in hardcopy) a report.

We have an Extra Notes feature in our report settings which caters to this. It's our Notes Preferences feature and the most common setting is 'Display Inspector Notes and Extra Notes Inline', which when combined with naming the extra field 'Tenant Comments' using the report setting 'Extra Notes Title', allows you to prepare reports with extra space for tenants to make their comments, like so:

Important!
If you're including an extra field for tenants to add comments, you may want to export your PDF reports in landscape format so your final reports are not crowded. Please test the 'Create Landscape Export' report setting.

All of these settings are covered in this Help Article: Editing Reports: Customizing the Formatting of Your Reports 

Step 5: Changing the look of your report - Adding a Report Disclaimer

As mentioned in part one on setting up your templates, if your office is not going to use a coversheet with specific paragraphs on it, the report setting which adds a disclaimer is the perfect spot to include important phrasing and clauses on your reports.

This will be displayed differently to notes in a Summary section in that it will be the full-width of your report.

The image below summarises the different ways notes and paragraphs of text can be displayed in the Inspections app: 

Setting up a disclaimer is discussed in our Help Article: Editing Reports: Customizing the Formatting of Your Reports

Step 6: Saving your report settings

After you've experimented with your settings and they're exactly how you want, make sure you save your settings so they'll be available across devices and on the web.

Important!
Please remember, report settings are based on the report type and the folder, so you may need to do some additional setup right at the start of setting up your account.

Next...

Once your report settings are all setup exactly how you want, it's then time to go through the workflow of your ingoing inspections: Using Inspections App for Ingoing and Outgoing inspections.