Use case · Intake
Client and program intake forms that turn into records
An intake form is the start of a relationship, not the end of a questionnaire. In Matiks the answers become a record you work from — with the follow-up, the paperwork and the next step attached to it.
Why intake usually breaks after the form
Most intake tools are good at collecting answers and stop there. The response arrives as a row or an email, and the real work starts somewhere else: somebody copies the name into a spreadsheet, the documents into a folder, the next step into a calendar. Every hand-off is a place for a client or a participant to fall through.
Matiks is built the other way round. The form is the front door to a workspace, and what comes through it lands next to everything else you do with that person — their emails, their files, the stage they are at and the notes your team has left.
Build the form your intake actually needs
Build it one question at a time. The palette is grouped by what you want to know: text and contact details, an address that completes itself as it is typed, choices, file and photo uploads, a signature drawn on the page, and groups and repeaters for the parts that repeat — another child, another course, another household member.
Conditions show a question only when an earlier answer makes it relevant, so an adult does not wade through the guardian section and a returning client is not asked what you already know. A form can run over several pages, with a progress bar, a cover that explains what the form is for and an ending that says what happens next.
Intake often has to reach people in their own language. A form can be translated in one pass into any of 20 languages and then corrected line by line, and right-to-left languages lay out the whole page from the right.
Every response becomes a record
Each respondent becomes a record in your workspace — a person, a family, an organisation, whatever your intake is about — with the attributes you track and everything they submitted. Map any answer to a column on the record; several mapped questions land on one row, matched on the person’s email.
A program has stages that a client record should not have to carry forever. Lists hold those: a list gathers existing records for one piece of work — this cohort, this review round — with columns of its own for the stage, the decision or the caseworker. Removing somebody from a list never deletes the record.
If your team still lives in a spreadsheet, the Connect tab writes each response to Google Sheets as a row as it arrives.
Where responses goObjects, records and attributesProjects and lists
See the people who started and stopped
Intake has a deadline, and the people you most need to reach are often the ones who began the form and never finished it. On the Team plan and above, partial responses show up beside the completed ones with their progress, their last activity and any email address captured so far — so you can follow up before the deadline rather than after it.
The follow-up happens on its own
A workflow runs when a response arrives. It can send a confirmation that uses their answers, notify the team, wait a few days, take a different path depending on the answers, hold for an approval, or fill the PDF your funder or county still asks for. Sequences send a series of emails on your schedule and stop the moment somebody replies.
- Send a welcome email that uses the answers they just gave.
- Route a referral to the right person depending on the service requested.
- Hold an application until a coordinator approves it.
- Produce a filled intake PDF for the file, named after the client.
Bring the whole team in
Intake is rarely one person’s job. Every plan has unlimited seats, so the coordinator, the caseworkers and the volunteer who answers the phone can all work from the same records without anybody deciding who is worth a licence.
Read more about the parts of intake
Start with one intake form.
Build it from a template or a blank page, publish the link, and watch the first response arrive as a record.