Customising the intake form

Intake is how work arrives before it becomes a project: someone asks for something, an admin triages it, and it either becomes a project or does not. The form is customisable so that the triage decision can be made without a follow-up conversation.

Adding a field

1. 1Go to Admin → Setup & Data → Forms & Templates → Intake form.
2. 2Add a field, give it a label, and choose a type.
3. 3Mark it required if a request is genuinely useless without it.
4. 4Add help text where the label alone would be ambiguous.
5. 5Reorder fields so the cheapest questions come first.

Field types

Text

A single line. Names, references, short answers.

Textarea

Multiple lines. Descriptions and justifications.

Number

Numeric only. Estimated value, headcount, volume.

Date

A single date. Needed-by, event dates.

Select

One option from a list you define.

Multiselect

Several options from a list you define.

What makes a good intake form

The temptation is to ask everything, because every field looks cheap to the person adding it. It is not cheap to the person filling it in, and a long form does not produce better requests — it produces fewer requests and more side-channel asks in chat.

A useful test for each field: if the answer were missing, would you actually decline the request, or would you just ask? If you would just ask, the field is optional at best.

Triage

Submitted requests appear under Intake. You can act on them individually or in bulk, which matters once a backlog builds up. Bulk actions exist precisely so a neglected queue can be cleared in one sitting rather than abandoned.