How This Mobile App Came to Be
Over the past several years I have used numerous inspection software programs, mobile apps and fillable PDF forms for doing these little insurance inspections. If you are like me, you have found yourself about to pull your hair out of your head because the software or app only worked maybe 70% of the time. There was always something the software or app would not let me do.
Sometimes a home would have more than one air conditioning system or it had more than two electrical panels. I needed to be able to add HVAC sections and electrical panels.
Other times there may not have been a permit date for a home’s new roof because in my area mobile homes do not require a roof permit or maybe it was re-roofed right after a hurricane and the city told people to just proceed without a permit because of the workload. So, what do I do where the software asked for a date and it would not let me put a note or estimated date in that space? I needed to be able to make a custom entry rather than being forced to use the drop-down calendar.
And then there were reports that had to be updated because repairs were made. With all the photos bunched up at the bottom of the report I practically had to start over. I needed to remove and replace photos from an existing report without having to blow the whole thing up.
It just seemed that no matter whose software or app I purchased they were just 98% of where they needed to be. It always appeared that they were created by someone who was a home inspector with no software design experience or a software designer with no inspection experience. Either way, something was always missing.
So, I decided to do something about it. I started with creating dynamically interactive forms. I went out and bought all the software I needed to create the forms myself. That turned out to be a mistake. I spent a year trying to create them but being a designer/coder is a full-time gig if you want to be good at it. I had become the inspector with no design experience. You would think I would have seen that coming. Obviously, this was going to need a collaboration between myself and an experienced programming team. So that is what I did.
After going through a boat load of them, I finally found the right people and started the project. I learned quickly why it was impossible to find a good fillable PDF form out there. It is a tedious, arduous, and expensive process. It took more time for me to write the instructions and communicate what I wanted each element of the form to do than it took the programmers to create it. But it worked, we came up with forms that work! But those PDF forms were not mobile and suited only to inspectors that wanted to create their reports on a PC. They did not work on tablets or phones.
Those 4 Point Inspection, Roof Inspection and Wind Mitigation forms are still available at www.4PointInspectionform.com and they work great if you build your reports on a PC. Watch the videos on the home page to see how we resolved the issues mentioned above.
Now, we needed to go mobile and that is what we have done!
Working with a great design/development team we spent several arduous months and immense financial resources to come up with the best app ever created for doing Florida insurance inspections. All the problems we resolved with our forms are now resolved within this app. It is so packed with special features that I can not possibly list them all here.
Whether you use our PDF forms or this app, you are going to be amazed at how much time and stress is saved by using our products.