Form-Based Worksheets are a lovely thing: they let you create worksheets for your clients to fill out that have text areas to type in, checkboxes to check off, drop down menus to make selections in and so on.  This is all a variation on the theme of regular Worksheets, which work like free-form documents that can be edited freely as if working on a Word doc (the kind of setup wherein you type a question and hit Enter a few times to make space for your clients to type in their answer).

Session Notes, by contrast, have always been just the free-form variety, allowing coach to define a template as a convenient starting point but then type freely in and around that template when filling out notes for a session with a specific client.

But it turns out that sometimes it’s nice to have Session Notes be similarly structured, providing a concrete set of points to cover, questions to ask (and answers to record), and whatever other form elements to check off/fill out.  This is especially so in a team setting, wherein a coach might be expected to more rigorously follow a standardized formula of how to conduct a session and capture the essential notes & information from it.

To that end CoachAccountable now offers Form-Based Session Notes.  Setting up a Form-based Session Template works just like setting up a Form-Based Worksheet.  In the template builder WYSYIWYG editor you’ll now see the “Insert form item” button:

I’ve remixed the classic pre-loaded Session Template and added a few extra rating items.

When you’ve got a Form-Based Session defined (i.e. a Session Template which contains one or more form items) filling it out for one of your clients works just like filling out a Form-Based Worksheet, including any validation rules that have been set for the template:

The validation rules make a nice way to ensure you (or your team coaches) do complete work in filling out the notes for a session.

Everything else about Form-Based Sessions works like their Worksheet counterparts: when you email the session notes to your clients they’ll rendered all pretty with your specific answers highlighted in blue, and you can use Fom-Based Session answers to pipe into Metrics in the exact same way as Worksheet answers do.

All in all this is a nice, seamless alternative to taking free-form Session Notes, which for some organizations (and even some personal styles) will be a real win.  If you like how Form-Based Worksheets work to allow your clients to fill things out in a structured way, give these a try for your Session Notes.