Why and How These Forms Were Created
Over the past several years I have used fillable PDF forms for doing these little insurance inspections. If you are like me, you have found yourself about to pull your hair out of your head because the forms only worked maybe 70% of the time. There was always something the form wouldn’t let me do.
Sometimes a home would have more than one air conditioning system or it had more than two electrical panels. I needed to be able to add HVAC sections and electrical panels.
Other times there may not have been a permit date for a home’s new roof because in my area mobile homes do not require a roof permit or maybe it was re-roofed right after a hurricane and the city told people to just proceed without it because of the workload. So, what do I do where the form asked for a date and it wouldn’t let me put a note or estimated date in that space? I needed to be able to make a custom entry rather than being forced to use the drop-down calendar.
And then there were reports that had to be updated because repairs were made. With all the photos bunched up at the bottom of the report I practically had to start over. I needed to remove and replace photos from an existing report without having to blow the whole thing up.
It just seemed that no matter who’s forms I purchased they were just 98% of where they needed to be. It always appeared that they were created by someone who was a home inspector with no form design experience or a form designer with no inspection experience. Either way, something was always missing. So, I decided to do something about it.
I went out and bought all the software I needed to create the forms myself. That turned out to be a mistake. I spent a year trying to create them but being a designer/coder is a full-time gig if you want to be good at it. I had become the inspector with no design experience. You’d think I would have seen that coming. Obviously, this was going to need a collaboration between myself and an experienced programming team. So that is what I did.
After going through a boat load of them, I finally found the right people and started the project. I learned quickly why it was impossible to find a good fillable PDF form out there. It is a tedious, arduous, and expensive process. It took more time for me to write the instructions and communicate what I wanted each element of the form to do than it took the programmers to create it. But it worked, we came up with forms that work!
The 4 Point Inspection, Roof Inspection, and Wind Mitigation forms available on this website work great. Watch the videos on the home page to see how we resolved the issues mentioned above. You are going to like these forms.
Please feel free to call or email me if you have any questions. You can go to our Contact page for my contact info.