frevvo enables universal access to e-forms and workflows on tablets and smart phones in addition to desktop support on all standard browsers. iOS 6+ devices, iPad and iPhone, running mobile safari are supported. This tutorial will incorporate several frevvo features into an Employee On Boarding workflow. For example;
You can download this tutorial as a PDF. |
Please view the New Employee On Boarding video for an introduction to some of the exciting features we will be using in this tutorial. We estimate about 2.5 to 3.0 hours for an experienced frevvo designer to complete this tutorial. It may take up to 4.0 hours if you are a new user.
A frevvo workflow is a series of routed forms that can run on any devices including the tablets and smart phones. In this tutorial, we will create a workflow that can be used when onboarding a new employee joining your company. There will be three participants: the new employee, the new employee's manager and an employee that works for the company HR department. The new employee will complete three forms (Employee Information, W-4 Allowances, Education History) and a confirmation step, where they will have an opportunity to confirm the entered data with their signature after reviewing a the completed W-4 as a PDF. These four steps are referred to as a screenflow. A screenflow consists of steps in a workflow that are performed by the same person. The new employee will complete the screenflow from an iPad and the task will be sent to the new employee's manager for approval. The approval step will be performed on an iPhone using the Quick Approval feature. Once the task is approved, it will go to the HR department for finalization and storage. This tutorial will cover the following:
Create the Employee Onboarding Workflow using the PageBreak control to design the forms for a mobile device, in this case, the iPad. The screenflow includes a confirmation form for the new employee to review the generated W-4 PDF. The Confirmation form utilizes the Form Viewer and Signature controls.
Test the workflow on the tablet, mobile device and desktop
This is a one-time setup that will have to be performed by an administrator. |
We will need three roles: employee, manager and hr. To create these roles in frevvo:
If you are using frevvo Online, go directly to Step 5. frevvo in-house users will have to create a tenant first before adding roles/users. Follow Steps 1-4 to do that:
The admin user will also need to setup three users, assigning one of the three roles to each one:
Make one more user named designer and assign this user the frevvo.Designer role. Use the designer user to create the Employee On Boarding workflow.
You will immediately see your workflow diagram in the Guided Designer: Workflow editing mode.
Next, we'll customize each of the new forms created by the Workflow Design Wizard. Go to the Guided Designer: Forms editing mode. Notice that the Employee Form is shown.
You can switch forms anytime by clicking "Switch Form" and choosing another step in your workflow. |
You will also see that a "My Items" section has been added for you - this will save some time when designing this form! Refer to Designing Forms for in-depth information on the frevvo features and controls described in the steps below.
As you create the forms, keep in mind the screen sizes of the devices you are targeting when designing forms for mobile devices. The screenflow for this tutorial consists of four forms: Employee Information, W-4 Allowances, Education History and Confirmation. We expect the new employee will complete the screenflow on an iPad. Let's begin with a close look at how the PageBreak control can be used to divide the Employee information form into sections that will make it very easy to fill in the information on the iPad. Typically, information about a new employee would include: name, address, SSN, Telephone Numbers, email address and possibly a profile photo. Creating this form for a desktop view would be very simple in the frevvo designer. A form designed for the desktop could look like the image below: Mobile forms work best when they are broken up into small, logical pieces. The PageBreak control lets the designer create a mobile layout consisting of multiple pages where each page contains a small number of controls (logical groupings). The user navigates between the pages via Back/Next buttons, or on a device that supports it, by swiping left/right. We will use sections plus the PageBreak control to illustrate these concepts. Employee Information Form designed for a Desktop browser |
Let's add a logo and form title to give users a frame of reference when they open this form.
Drag a message control from the palette and drop it next to your logo. Type the text "New Employee Onboarding Form" in the message area. You can bold the text by checking bold on the Style tab for the message control.
Next we'll add some additional controls to the default My Items section.
Add a text control and name it SSN. A pattern can be used to ensure the correct format number for the Social Security Number. Here is an example of a valid pattern: \d{3}-\d{2}-\d{4}. Apply this pattern to the field by typing it into the Pattern field on the Control property pane. frevvo will display an error message if the entered data does not match the Make sure the required property is checked.
Drag and drop a text field below the Street control. Label it City. Make it Required.
Drag a dropdown control from the palette, name it State and make it Required. Type in the names of some states into the Options section on the dropdown control property pane.
Drop a text control to the right of the State dropdown. Label it Zip Code and make it Required. Designate a Max Length of 5 characters.
Drag, drop and resize controls as needed. Your form should look like similar to the image at this point:
Notice that the My Items section includes a Wet Signature control so the Employee can sign using the a track pad/mouse or a touch screen to verify the allowance selections entered into the form. This is what the new employee will see when signing. |
Save your work
The Employee Information form should look like this at this point:
Save your work.
Design the Allowances Form
In this form, we will collect information for the Personal Allowances section of the W - 4 Employee's Withholding Allowance Certificate. The section is shown below. The e-form will have controls corresponding to each field on the W-4.
Here is an example. We will map the data in these fields, along with some others, to the W - 4 PDF later in this tutorial.
For this tutorial, we'll just create controls for Filing Status, Step 2: Multiple Jobs, and Step 3: Claim Dependent.
Download and install this example EOB workflow which includes a fully-mapped W-4. |
Drag a Message Control into the form. In the Message Property, type
Please complete the information below. A Federal W-4 Form will be generated. You will have the opportunity to review the form before submitting. |
Change the Type to Bordered. On the Style tab, select Bold.
Drag a radio control into that section. Name it Federal Filing Status. Enter these options:
Single_or_Married_filing_separately=Single or Married filing separately Married_filing_jointly=Married filing jointly (or qualifying widow(er)) Head_of_Household=Head of Household (Check only if you're unmarried and pay more than half the costs of keeping up a home for yourself and a qualifying individual.) |
Check the Required property.
Drag a checkbox control into the Step 2: Multiple Jobs section. Name it Multiple Jobs or Spouse works, and add just a single option:
Only_2_Jobs=If there are only two jobs total, you may check this box. Do the same on From W-4 for the other job. This option is accurate for jobs with similar pay; otherwise, more tax than necessary may be withheld. |
Drag in another section and name it Step 3: Claim Dependents.
Save your work.
Design an Education form similar to the image below. We'll use a table control to collect information about the new employee's Education. Refer to the Add/Remove columns in a table topic for more information.
Drag a Dropdown control from the palette, and drop it to the right of the Institution column. Name it "Degree Attained".
Click the first row in that column. In the Options property, type
High School=High School Bachelors=Bachelors Masters=Masters PhD=PhD |
Click on the Table control then select the Style tab on the Properties panel. Enter these percentage values, separated by a space, to adjust the widths of the four columns: 10% 10% 50% 25%
Save your work.
The purpose of the Confirmation form in the Employee On Boarding workflow is to give the new employee the opportunity to review the information in the generated W-4 PDF and then sign to indicate the information has been reviewed and verified.
Save your work. We will add the Form Viewer control to display the mapped W-4 Pixel Perfect PDF later in this tutorial.
The Confirmation Form already contains two approval sections for the Manager Approval and the Office Use only steps. Business rules will ensure they only appear on or after their corresponding steps. The Approval section will be used by the new employee's manager to approve or reject the screenflow. In this scenario, the manager, Jerry, will use his iPhone to perform this task when it appears in his Task List. You can use the frevvo Quick Approval feature to make that process easy. Quick Approval requires an Approval control. An approval control is a section control in your form with a text area control inside of it. You can set up a signed section if you want the manager to sign after approving or rejecting the task. The Workflow Design Wizard automatically adds approval sections for each approval-type step you add to your workflow.
The last step in the Employee On Boarding workflow is performed by Sue, who works in the HR department of the company. Sue receives the task from the manager, Jerry and proceeds to complete the final form, sign it and submit the data to the company database. Create a form similar to the image below.
Add a date control for the Performance Review Date and a dropdown control for the Pay Grade.
Use a message control for the instruction: "Confirm that the new employee has completed the following:". One way to bold the message text is to use HTML tags in the message control. For example, the text should be encased in <b>text</b>, as shown in the image. You can also turn on the Rich Text Editor for Message Controls if you require more text formatting.
Use the T/F control for the policy questions - Drag four T/F controls from the palette into the section. Make sure they are below the Message control. Check the New Line property on the Style tab to get the T/F controls to line up underneath each other. Change the labels of the T/F Controls to: Read Harassment Policy, Read Email Policy, Read Confidential Data Policy and Received the Employee Handbook.
Save your work.
Next we'll configure the business logic that show, hide and calculate fields in our forms. Click the Rules mode in the Guided Designer navigation bar.
We will add another rule to combine the First Name and Initial.
The Visual Rule Builder consists of 3 wizards:
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We will write the third rule to combine the address fields.
The Visual Rule Builder consists of 3 wizards:
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Here is a rule to populate the Date control when the new employee signs on the Employee form.
The Visual Rule Builder consists of 3 wizards:
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frevvo lets you take advantage of the iPad's location services. The Geo-location feature works with rules. Below is an example of a rule that fills in the street, city, state and zip controls each time the location is updated. Add this rule to your form now and we will turn the feature on in the workflow later in this tutorial.
Name this rule Location.
Click the Rule Code then Edit Code buttons. Copy/Paste the rule below into the rules canvas.
if (form.positionUpdated) { var x = _data.getParameter ("position.street_number"); Street.value = _data.getParameter ("position.street_number") + ' ' + _data.getParameter ("position.route"); City.value = _data.getParameter ("position.locality"); State.value = _data.getParameter ("position.administrative_area_level_1"); ZipCode.value = _data.getParameter ("position.postal_code"); } |
Save your work.
Now we'll use rules to calculate the total allowances.
Write two rules that calculate the Dependent Child Allowance and Other Dependent Allowance.
The Visual Rule Builder consists of 3 wizards:
Repeat the steps above for Other Dependents, multiplying the Other Dependents field by 500. |
Now add a rule to calculate the Total Dependent Allowances.
The Visual Rule Builder consists of 3 wizards:
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Save your work.
Click Switch Form and select Confirmation. Notice that the Initialization rule is highlighted in pink, indicating there is an error. The error is that we deleted the My Items section, so the controls it refers to don't exist. So, we can delete this rule. Click the Action Menu and select Delete. The other rules on this form will show/hide the Approval and Office Use only sections on the appropriate step. They should not require any changes, but you can view them to get a sense for the logic.
Save your work.
If the W-4 that you downloaded does not have a writable field for the signature, follow these steps to add one using PDFescape:
The PDF Mapping mode provides functionality to enable designers to map e-form fields to PDF fields.
Mapping is performed one field at a time in the context of a PDF page. Mapping can be accomplished in two ways:
We will use the Drag and Drop method in this tutorial. Information on using the PDF Mapping dialogue can be found here. Follow the steps in this section to map fields in the Employee Information and Allowance forms in our workflow to the W-4 acroform PDF.
Click the PDF Mapping mode in the Guided Designer navigation bar. Existing mapped PDFs for your form/workflow will be listed. Since we have not mapped a PDF yet, there will be none listed.
Use the New Form Generation screen to upload the Acroform for the W-4 Acroform PDF that you downloaded and modified earlier in this tutorial. Click the New icon to begin. Fill in the name of the template, W-4 in this case, and browse to the location of the W-4 Acroform. Select Generate as fillable form. Click OK.
The W-4 will be listed as a PDF to be generated for this activity of the workflow. frevvo makes a copy of the uploaded Acroform template and modifies it with available selections of appropriate e-form fields for each PDF Acroform field. The modified PDF Acroform (Mapper) will be re-generated every time because the e-form fields may have changed.
We will not map all the fields on the Acroform PDF for this tutorial. Drag and drop controls for these fields in the W-4 mapper. If you have been naming the controls as suggested in this tutorial, control names should be the same as the frevvo Control Name column shown in the table.
Acroform PDF Field | frevvo Control Name |
---|---|
First Name and Middle Initial | FirstPlusInitial |
Last Name | LastName |
Address | Street |
City or town, state and ZIP code | FullAddress |
Social Security Number | SSN |
Filing Status | Map each FederalFilingStatus Option to the corresponding checkbox. |
Multiply the number of qualifying children... | ChildDependentCalculation |
Multiply the number of other dependents... | OtherDependentCalculation |
Add the amounts above and enter total... | ClaimDependentsTotal |
Employee Signature | Signature (from Confirmation step) |
Date | Signature Date (from Confirmation step) |
Employer's Name and Address | EmployerSNameAndAddress |
Employer's EIN | EmployerEIN |
If the control names are truncated in the Mapping Form Outline, hover over the control to see the entire name. |
Click the Done button when the mapping is completed and thenSave your work.
Go to the Forms editing mode using the Guided Designer navigation bar.
Click Switch Forms and select the Confirmation form. Drag and drop one Form Viewer control from the workflow palette to the form. Change the label of the Form Viewer control to Review Your W-4 form. Change the label color and any other style changes you want to make on the Style tab in the Properties pane. See Style Properties for more information.
Click on the Form Viewer control to select it. Select the W-4 form from the Form dropdown on the properties pane. Save your work.
We already configured step assignments, or routing, when we built this workflow in the Workflow Design Wizard. However, we'll customize a few things like the Task Assignment emails and Continue Button labels.
We'll customize the continue buttons to give the user more context about what will happen when they click it.
You can configure the email that is sent when the workflow is put on someone's Task List. Jerry, the Manager, receives an email notifying him if there is a new task in the Task List. To set this up, click on the Approval Step, and then the Assignments tab. Make changes to the Task Notification Email section at the bottom of the Wizard as shown below. Notice the Templatized Strings in the message shown in the image below.
Jerry, the manager, will receive an email informing him that there is a New Employee On Boarding task on his Task List. Notice the {task.list.url} is replaced by the link to Jerry's task list. When Jerry clicks this link, he will be directed to his task list. He will have to login if he is not signed on to access it.
Repeat these steps for the Office Use step that will go to the HR department, customizing the email subject and message however you would like.
Save your work.
You can customize the message each user will see by typing it into the Pending Message field on the Messages tabs for the following step. For example, to configure the message the new employee will see after the Confirmation step, we'll configure Pending Message on the Approval step.
Pending messages display when the workflow navigates to a different user. In our scenario, you may want to customize the message that the employee sees when they complete the screenflow and the workflow navigates to a user with the Manager role for approval/rejection. Note the Pending message for the step is always placed on the step that comes after the step where you want it to display. This is because the workflow navigates to the next workflow step first then it displays any configured messages. The message that the employee sees when the workflow goes to the Manager must be configured on the Manager Approval step. The message that the Manager sees when the workflow goes to a user in the HR department must be configured on the HR step. |
To customize the message the employee sees when the Confirmation step is completed and the workflow goes to the Manager.
To customize the message the Manager sees when the Approval step is completed and the workflow goes to HR: Here is an example: "The On Boarding Package was sent to the Human Resource Department"
In our scenario, when the screenflow is completed by the new employee, the manager will receive a notification and access their Task List using a smart phone. The Quick Approval feature lets the manager review a summary of the information and quickly approve/reject the task.
The Confirmation step has a signed section called approval with one textarea control in it. This section meets the criteria for an Approval Control and can be setup for the Quick Approval feature.
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If you want to capture the current location of the new employee when they are filling out the Employee Information form, turn on frevvo' location feature. Click on the Employee Information form and click the Geolocation tab. We added a rule to the Employee information form to take advantage of the iPad location services earlier in this tutorial. Once you have the rules in place, you can choose to have the rules execute when the form loads (the On Load) option of the Geo-Location dropdown or specify a custom time period of how often the rules should execute (the custom option of the Geo Location dropdown). Check Detailed Location to capture additional information, like an address, based on the location.
For the next two tasks, click the Setting editing mode in the Guided Designer navigation bar.
You can setup any control on the form that will give the manager more information on the task to be performed by using Templatized Strings in the Task Info field on the form's property panel. In this scenario, the Manager and the HR employee will need to approve/reject the new employee on boarding so we will set up the same task information for all the steps. To do this:
Click the Message tab.
Type New Employee: {FirstName} {LastName} into the Task Information field on the forms Property Panel - the First and Last Name controls are enclosed in curly brackets. These are examples of Templatized Strings. frevvo will substitute the new employee's first and last names for these templatized strings at runtime.
Select Save and Close from the action menu to return to the Forms & Workflows list.
On the Forms and Workflows Home page, select Thumbnail from the Action Menu to assign a thumbnail to your Employee On Boarding workflow that will display on the iPad and iPhone. You can upload your own icon or select one that frevvo provides.
On the Forms and Workflows home page, select Deploy from the Action Menu. You will see a flag icon to show you this workflow is deployed to production.
There are several ways to test the Employee On Boarding workflow. We will use a frevvo space which can be a valuable tool for testing mobile forms on the iPhone and iPad. Before creating your space, make sure the visibility of your Employee On boarding workflow is set to Anyone or Authenticated Users and that it is deployed to production.
Follow the steps below to quickly create a space to test the Employee On Boarding workflow: