Help Center

Intake form

Your public request page: choosing the link that turns it on, sharing it so you can tell which sign or profile brought the work in, the advice visitors read after they send a request, and who gets told when one arrives.

The intake form is a page anyone can open without an account. Someone whose basement is flooding fills it in, and the request arrives in Operant as a new job with their photos attached. The people you name get an email straight away.

Settings → Intake form is where you set it up.

Everything about the address lives in the banner at the top of the page: whether people can reach it, what it is, and the buttons that copy it, open it and change it. It is the only place the address is printed, so there is never a second copy to wonder about.

A brand new organization already has a form, but nobody can reach it. The banner says Not live yet and opens with the link field already showing, because choosing the link is what turns the form on.

  1. The field arrives with a suggestion built from your company name. Change it to whatever you would rather read out over the phone.
  2. Watch the line under the field. It says Available, or it tells you the link is taken or not allowed.
  3. Press Go live and confirm the address in the box that opens.

The banner turns green and names the full address, with Copy link and Preview beside it. That address is now public.

Keep the link short. Somebody is going to read it out on a phone call from a wet basement.

Press Change link in the banner. The field opens underneath the address, in place — nothing else on the page moves except the banner growing to make room. Cancel folds it back up.

You can change it, and the old one keeps working for twelve months. After that it stops. Anything printed with the old link — a door hanger, a truck decal, a QR code on a yard sign — sends people to the new address until that date, so you have a year to reprint.

The app tells you the exact date before it saves.

The Accepting requests switch sits in the banner, across from the word Live. Flip it off and the form pauses straight away; there is nothing to save. The banner changes to Paused, visitors see a note with your phone number instead of the form, and the address still shows so you can open it and read what they read. Flip it back on when you are ready. Use the switch when you are shut for a week; use a link change only when the address itself is wrong.

Places you share it

The Share tab is one list: every place you can advertise this form, and how much work each one actually sent back.

Each row names the place, says where to paste the link, and shows the tag that goes on the end of the address — ?src=google, ?src=facebook. Copy link copies the whole thing, tag and all. Six places come as standard: your Google Business Profile, your Facebook page, your Instagram bio, listing sites like Yelp or HomeStars, your email signature, and anything printed.

To the right of every row is the count for the period in the card's header — the last 30 days, 90 days or 12 months — with a bar showing how it compares to your busiest place. Somebody writing twice about the same job counts once.

Two rows are not places you paste anything:

  • Link with no tag is the plain address, with nothing on the end. Those requests still arrive, but they tell you nothing about where they came from. It costs nothing to use a tagged link instead.
  • Your website is the form sitting on your own site.

A tag that shows up in your requests but is on nobody's list — an older link somebody still has — appears at the bottom of the list, marked Not in your list, with its count intact.

Adding a place of your own

Add a place at the bottom of the list covers anywhere the six built-ins do not: a van decal, a trade show, a radio spot. Type a name in lowercase letters, numbers and dashes, press Add, and it becomes a row of its own with its own link to copy. It is saved as soon as it appears — there is no Save button on this tab.

You can keep twenty. Removing one takes it off the list; the link carries on working and the requests it already brought in stay counted, so the row comes back at the bottom as one that is no longer in your list.

The QR code

The QR code on the Share tab points at the same form and counts as print. Download it as a PNG for a sign shop, or as an SVG if they want something they can scale without it going fuzzy.

The PNG comes out at 1024 pixels on a white background, which is enough for a truck door.

Putting the form on your own website

The Put the form on your website card has a one-line snippet. Hand it to whoever looks after your site and tell them where you want the form to appear.

Underneath it is the Allowed websites list. Only sites on that list can show your form; until you add one, the form will not load inside a page at all. Add your own site there before you paste the snippet. Type the address without https:// — just yourcompany.ca.

Who hears about a request

On the Form settings tab, Email these people is the list of staff who get an email the moment a request arrives. Owners and admins are on it to begin with. Take people off, add people on.

An empty list means a request sits unread until somebody opens the jobs list. The page warns you when that happens.

What visitors read

The Form settings tab holds three cards: what visitors see, what they should do until you arrive, and who hears about a request. What visitors see controls the form itself.

Company name on the form and Phone override what the form would otherwise take from your organization profile. Leave them blank and the profile wins.

After-hours number sits at the top of the form for people who cannot wait for an email. Leave it blank and nothing is shown.

When you will get back to them finishes the sentence "We will be in touch …". Say something you can keep.

These save with the Save changes button, which appears at the bottom of the screen as soon as you change something.

What to do until you arrive

After someone sends a request, the confirmation page and the email they get both carry a short piece of advice for the type of damage they picked: turn the water off, stay out of the smoke-damaged rooms, do not scrub the mold. The What to do until you arrive card lists every type of damage your form offers, with its advice beside it.

Click the advice, or the pencil, to change it. It turns into a box you can type in, with a count of how many of the 300 characters you have used. Save keeps it, Cancel puts it back. Cmd+Enter (Ctrl+Enter on Windows) saves from the keyboard and Escape cancels. Each row saves on its own the moment you press Save; the Save changes button has nothing to do with them.

A type with no advice yet shows Add advice for and its name. Leave a type empty and visitors who pick it get the last row instead.

The last row, Any other type of damage, is what a visitor reads when their type of damage has no advice of its own. It is never blank.

The list follows the Loss types page: rename a type there and the row here renames, turn a type off and its row disappears. Only the advice itself is edited here.

If your organization has more than one branch, a Form for picker at the top of the page switches between the organization form and each branch, the same way the Stripe and QuickBooks pages do. A branch uses the organization link unless you give it one of its own.

Pick a branch, press Set up separate link, choose a link for it, and requests through that link land in that branch. On a branch with its own form, Use organization link in the banner undoes it. The branch link stops working immediately when you do, so do not undo it while it is still printed on anything.