Form-Building software: there’s plenty of it around. A quick online search will return a plethora of options.

But choosing the right solution for your precise business needs is a big challenge. There are so many key factors to consider; ease-of-use, sensible pricing, scalability, storage allowances, cyber-security provisions, system redundancy, data-centre location, data access, data retention policy, contractual duration, and much more. Finding the right solution is not easy.

We know this because we had the same difficulties ourselves. AppCan was created by people with previous careers in utility construction operations, so we know the challenges of digitising field-based processes. Back then – and it’s still the case now – we simply could not find one form-building solution that ticked all the right boxes.

So, in 2013, we set about developing AppCan. A simple, cost-effective product that could be easily customised to meet the needs of businesses with people working out there, in the field. A system that would excel in data collection but would also act as a full extension of the back office. It needed to be ultra-secure to protect valuable data, work on existing hardware, and be easy to use for non-technical people.

Today, when we think about our AppCan platform, we don’t consider it to be a software service competing with others to build electronic versions of paper forms. Yes, ‘form building’ is an essential part of the process, but it’s not the whole picture. For us, we regard ‘form digitisation’ as the process of creating unique data sets with full access to this data. The main prize is being able to connect data sets to augment business reporting for your organisation.

This approach is what separates AppCan from other ‘form building’ solutions.

1. With AppCan, you get to craft your data sets – we don’t prescribe how these should be built, our aim is to provide you with a feature-rich toolkit allowing you to build and control how your mobile users capture the data you need for reporting and analysis.
2. Everything is accessible. We provide a host of options for you to securely access your data – our data warehouse, our API suite, or simply via CSV export services.
3. Unlike other systems, we don’t just concentrate data into larger interconnected data sets for reporting tools to visualise. AppCan provides you with ways to automate sharing of your data, your reports, and your notifications with others outside the AppCan platform.
4. Often, two or more field-force members are involved in raising, reviewing, and approving form submissions before they become ‘complete’. Our unique mobile-to-mobile sharing feature allows users to complete relevant form sections and then ‘push’ the form to other AppCan mobile users for their information to be added.
5. You can preload your forms with data and send partially completed records to your community of mobile users to fill in the missing field-based data.

It is this combination of modern application software, cloud database hosting and use of commonly available database reporting tools (such as Power BI), that we think should guide your strategic thinking on choosing the best ‘Form Building’ solution for your business – one that ticks all the right boxes!