Global Forms vs. Project-Specific Forms: What’s the Difference?
📄 Global Forms vs. Project-Specific Forms: What’s the Difference?
Ontraccr supports two ways to create and manage forms: as global forms or project-specific forms. While both use the same form builder, where and how they’re created determines how they’re used.
This article explains the difference between global and project-specific forms, how each is created, and how they behave in your workflows.
🧱 What Are Global Forms?
Global forms are templates created from the Documents → Forms → Templates section. These are system-wide forms that can be reused across different projects.
They are ideal for:
- Company-wide forms like safety reports, change orders, RFIs, or site logs
- Standardized workflows you want to maintain across multiple jobs
- Building and maintaining a central template library
🏗️ What Are Project-Specific Forms?
Project-specific forms are created inside a specific project under Projects → [Project] → Forms tab (within each project). These forms are tied directly to that project.
When do you use Project Specific Forms?
These are typically used if a project requires a unique workflow or custom fields that are atypical compared to the global template. For example, if a project has a unique process for reporting safety documents, you can copy the global safety form template and customize the workflow to automate the forwarding of the form to the project’s specific safety rep based on its unique workflow.
There are two ways to create a project-specific form:
- Create from scratch inside the project
- Import from Global Forms to use an existing template
Once added, the form exists only in that project and does not affect the global version it was imported from.
🔄 Summary Comparison
| Feature/Behavior | Global Form | Project-Specific Form |
|---|---|---|
| Created from | Forms > Templates | Projects > [Project] > Forms tab (within each project) |
| Can be reused across projects | ✅ | ❌ (only exists in one project) |
| Can be imported into a project | ✅ | ❌ |
| Tied to a specific project | ❌ | ✅ |
| Appears in global Forms tab | ✅ | ❌ (only visible in the project tab) |
| Can be edited without affecting others | Edits applied to Global template (does not affect forms already imported into project) | ✅ (edits are local to that project only) |
| Used for centralized standardization | ✅ | ❌ |
🧠 Key Takeaways
- If you're building a form to be reused across many jobs → create a global form
- If you're building a form just for one job or need to localize an existing form → use a project-specific form
- Imported forms from the global library become independent project-specific forms once added to a project