How do I create forms?

Last updated: August 18, 2026

Upload your source documents and Onboarded builds a draft form from each one, ready for your review in Form Studio.

Before you start

  • The form-create permission on your user group. Without it, New Form is disabled.

  • Your source documents as .pdf, .zip, or .html files.

  • A sense of which documents are handbooks, tax forms, or identity forms — you'll set a document type per file.

Steps

The flow has three phases: add your files, set how each one is read, then submit the batch.

Add your files

  1. Open Forms and select New Form.

  2. Drag your documents onto the upload area, or select browse to pick them from your machine. It accepts .pdf, .zip, and .html, up to 50 files at a time — a .zip expands into the PDFs inside it.

    You should see every file listed under Files, with a running count like 3 of 50 files.

Set how each file is read

  1. Rename any file whose filename isn't the form name you want. The name you set here becomes the form's name.

  2. Set Document type on each file. Leave it on Auto-detect to let Onboarded read the document and choose, or pick Handbook / posters, Policy / disclosure, Tax / withholding, Identity / document verification, or Generic yourself.

  3. Select Apply to all next to a file's type when every document in the batch is the same kind.

  4. Check Request Onboarded support if you want Onboarded to review the drafts before they come back to you. Each file gains an instructions box — use it to say what matters on that particular form.

Submit the batch

  1. Set Output language. Onboarded detects the source document's language and builds in it; any additional languages you select here are translated from that.

  2. Select Create forms. The button counts what's ready — Create 12 forms, for example.

    You should land back on Forms with a banner telling you your forms will start appearing as they're prepared, and each new form showing Waiting for AI.

Verify

Conversion runs in the background, so the list won't fill in straight away — refresh, or come back to it later. You're done when each form moves off Waiting for AI:

  • Waiting for Customer — the draft is ready for you. Open it in Form Studio to review and publish it.

  • Waiting for Onboarded — you asked for support, and Onboarded has the draft.

  • Build Failed — Onboarded couldn't build a form from that file.

If a file doesn't make it into the batch, check its row before you submit. The page tells you how many files need attention, and those files won't be processed. A file that failed to upload has a retry control on its row. A .zip reporting No PDF files found in the archive held no PDFs — unzip it yourself and add the PDFs directly.

A Build Failed status has two common causes. The first is a file that wasn't the format its extension claimed — a .pdf extension on something that isn't a PDF. Confirm the file opens as a PDF on your own machine, then upload it again. The second is language: if Onboarded can't detect the source document's language, or detects one your organization doesn't support, the build stops. Add that language to your organization's supported languages and re-upload.

Open each draft even when its status looks clean. Waiting for Customer tells you the conversion finished, not that it produced a complete form — a scanned or image-background PDF can come back with few or no fields, because its labels were pixels rather than text. If a draft arrives close to empty, the source is usually the reason: re-upload a text-based version of the PDF if you have one, or build that form from scratch instead.

If you hit the file cap, the page tells you how many files it left out. Onboarded takes 50 per batch; submit the first batch and start a second.

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