"Back Office Only" Fields in a APP sent to the customer, how are other users parceling out this hidden information?

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Kyle Templin
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For example a "Service Ticket" where our users are filling out a submission which gives a detailed overview of work performed. We want to include a field called "Customer Issues" where our user could list issues encountered when interacting with the point of contact (person was late, angry, absent, etc).  

This information is pertinent to our Back Office but we would not want it to display on the primary output of the APP (the one we email to the customer) .  Is there a way to generate two separate outputs & emails from a single submission?  The 2nd output could be automated to a specific email alias allowing it to bypass the completion screen.  If this is not possible what other methods have been employed for this kind of data?

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    Sara Kaplow, Community Manager

    From an official standpoint, there's not currently a way within GoCanvas to automatically email two different versions of the PDF. You can pull the non-automated one down manually from your Submissions page, but that's not ideal.

    I can think of a couple of ways to get your back office staff that information, but a couple of questions:

    1. Does the info have to get to them as a PDF (or could it be a google doc, for example, or even in the body of an email)?
    2. Does it need to look as pretty as the GoCanvas PDF, or could it be more basic? 
    3. Does the back office version always need to go to the same address, or will that vary based on something within the app? 

    I'd love to dive into ways we could maybe make this happen, but maybe someone else has already figured something out? 

     

     

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    Kyle Templin
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    Thanks for the reply Sara,

    To answer your questions:

    1. No real preference on how the information is obtained, email is currently how this information is being shared, but it requires an extra step outside of canvas, and the user has to retype all the contextual information (Date, Time in/out, Work Order#, Cust Name)

    2. It does not need to look as pretty

    3. I can create an alias that will forward to the correct people and can stay the same permanently.

    I would be very curious to hear what ideas you had in mind for work arounds.

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    Sara Kaplow, Community Manager

    Thanks, Kyle! 

    The quick way to do this would be similar to this: https://help.gocanvas.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360001676713/comments/360000590454 (but instead of adding the fields as photo attachments, you could add the back office only fields to the body of the email, and then just hide them on the PDF). 

    There's also a built-in email feature in Zapier that doesn't rely on Gmail, but I haven't played with it. 

    I'll do some tinkering this weekend and see if there's a better/cleaner way. 

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    Sara Kaplow, Community Manager

    The tricky part here is that Zapier can't really get a hold of the original PDF, which means we can't really automate your current system. However, we can replace that version (a manual email with the PDF attached) with a single either email or google doc file with all of the information in it. Either way, you'd start with a pretty simple Zap, with the trigger being a Submission from GoCanvas: 

    Then you can have the action be something like sending an email, and then have all of the fields included in the email body (I'm doing it through gmail, but Zapier has a built-in email sender):

    You can decide who to send it to, so that alias would be perfect. Then just hide all of these fields on the PDF designer, and your folks will get an email with all of the info included. 

    Similarly, you could put everything into a google doc (same basic setup, just with your action being to create a google doc), which you could then download as a PDF if you'd like. 

    I hope either of those might work - I know it's a bit frustrating to not be able to do this within GoCanvas, but hopefully this will make things a little less manual on your end.

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