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Templates Overview

Templates define the structure of an inspection — what sections, subsections, and fields appear on the mobile Capture Screen, and what shows up on the final PDF report. This article is the map for everything in the Templates area of the web admin. For the first-time tutorial, see Build Your First Template. For the canvas/layout side, see Template Designer. For the deep dive into the data model (sections → subsections → fields), see the Glossary.

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How “templates” actually work

A template is two coupled things: Both layers live in the same template document in Firestore. Editing either updates the same record. The split matters because schema changes affect the mobile inspector’s flow; canvas changes only affect rendering.

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The pages in the Templates area

The sidebar’s Templates link defaults to /templates/builder. From there, several deeper surfaces are reachable:
Cover Designer is separate from the Templates area — it lives at top-level /cover-designer. See Cover Designer. Covers are reusable across templates; assign a default cover to a template here.

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Standards supported

Templates can be authored against several inspection standards: The standard dictates rating definitions, language calibration for AI narratives, and default sections. Choosing the right standard matters because the AI tools (Generate, Vision, SPO) tune their language to the SoP.

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A typical template workflow

  1. Start with the TREC template (pre-built and ready to use). Tap + Initialize TREC Template in the Template Builder.
  2. Clone before customizing. Templates can be cloned via the rename dialog — make a copy so you always have the unmodified original to revert to.
  3. Edit the schema — add/remove sections, subsections, and fields. Done in Template Editor or via the Schema Upload & Review workflow if you have an existing PDF you want to extract.
  4. Set up the canvas — colors, photo grid, finding card style — in Template Designer.
  5. Configure page-level styling — headers, footers, section header design — in Visual Page Designer.
  6. Assign a default cover — pick from Cover Designer outputs in the Template Designer’s Default Cover field.
  7. Publish — toggle the template to Published. It becomes available to mobile inspectors when creating a new inspection.
  8. Iterate — Edit the live template. Changes propagate to new inspections immediately. Already-in-progress inspections keep their snapshot of the template at the time they started.

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Rating scales

Two built-in rating scales: The rating scale is set per template in the Template Designer header — “Rating Scale: TREC Standard (I / NI / NP / D) / Binary Pass / Fail”. Mobile inspectors see the chosen scale’s pills on the Capture Screen and Ratings Screen.