If you’ve ever enrolled a child for daycare, you know there’s forms involved. Lots of forms. Typically, these are printed PDF documents that are set by the state in which the child care center is located.
Our client the Presbyterian Early Learning Center (PELC), located in the Bay Area of California, wanted to provide away for their parents to fill out the required forms online. Since the state of California was already providing fillable PDFs for the state-mandated forms, we implemented CosmicGiant’s addon for Gravity Forms, “Fillable PDFs“, for not only State of California forms, but also some of the custom forms from the center, like their acknowledgement of having received the Parent Handbook.
Here’s an example: We converted the required California “Acknowledgment of Parent Rights” PDF to a form. The top three-quarters of this form is information about parent rights, along with specific information about the local licensing office, which is usually filled out by the center themselves before reproducing the form for parents. This information is reproduced in an HTML field at the top of the form. The Gravity Form fields include just the child’s name, the parent signature and the date. The field for the name of the child care center is automatically populated. The date is automatically populated with today’s date and the user is locked out from editing the field using the Gravity Perk GP Read Only.
After mapping the fields to the template of the fillable PDF, the form submission creates a PDF that looks like this example. This PDF is sent as an email attachment to the PELC admissions director. The parent/user filling out the form can optionally enter an email address to receive a copy of the signed form.
In total, we created eight separate Gravity Forms with connected Fillable PDFs, including the monster three page detailed Health History form. The client wanted to keep all these forms as separate Gravity Forms, although we offered to consolodate them into one long form so that parents didn’t need to keep typing in the same information repeatedly, like the child’s birthdate. We also offered the Save & Continue feature, but this was also declined. Since the time we built this system, CosmicGiant has released the new addon for Legal Signing, and we plan to offer this to the client for added peace of mind.