Conditional Intake Form Builder: Kill the 40-Field Form Nobody Finishes
Define branching rules in a sheet and get a smart intake form that shows each requester only the questions relevant to their request — then an intake owner approves each complete submission before it becomes a work item.
A web tool where your intake questions and branching logic live in an editable sheet, requesters see only the fields their answers unlock, the form validates that the path is complete, and an intake owner reviews and approves each submission before it becomes a work item — with a clean CSV export in your system's exact columns.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- A Google Sheet / CSV of your form questions and branching rules
- A people / department list
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Your request form started small. Then every team added "just one more field," and now it's a 40-question monster. Marketing requesters scroll past 15 questions about manufacturing tolerances. Facilities requesters fill in budget codes that don't apply to them. Half the submissions arrive incomplete because people gave up, and the other half are complete but full of fields that were never relevant to that request. Your intake owner spends their morning chasing people for the three answers that actually mattered.
The fix everyone reaches for — building five separate forms, one per request type — just trades one mess for another. Now you maintain five forms, the routing logic lives in someone's head, and adding a new request type means rebuilding from scratch.
What you actually want is one smart form that adapts: ask the request type first, then show only the questions that type needs, and refuse to submit until the fields that matter for that path are filled. You want the branching rules to live in a spreadsheet so a non-coder can change them without calling IT. And you don't need to be a developer to build it.
What you'll build
A single conditional intake form, driven entirely by a spreadsheet you control:
- Rules live in a sheet. Each row is a question: its label, its type (text, dropdown, number, date, file), a plain-language "show-when" rule (e.g. show when Request Type = Marketing), and whether it's required. Change the form by editing the sheet — no code.
- The form branches as people type. Questions appear and disappear based on earlier answers, so a requester only ever sees the fields relevant to their request.
- Validation that knows the path. The form only requires the fields that are actually in play for the answers given — so a submission is always complete for that path, never blocked by an irrelevant field.
- A human approval gate. Each completed submission lands in a review queue. Your intake owner checks it against the rules, then approves — and only then does it become a work item.
- Dedupe built in. The same requester can't accidentally file the same request twice: duplicates on requester + normalized title within 7 days are caught.
- Clean exports. Approved submissions export as a CSV in the exact columns your downstream system (Jira, Asana, your PMO tracker) expects.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent like Claude Code. It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, with a ready-to-copy prompt at the end of each step.
It opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it builds anything, the plan makes the agent ask you about your real intake process — your request types, the actual questions on your current form, how your fields are named, who owns approvals, your volumes, and the messy exceptions (the "rush" requests, the ones that need a budget code only sometimes). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up. The form you get is shaped around how you actually work — not a generic template you have to bend to fit.
From there it covers: loading your question/branching rules and people list from a sheet, the data model, rendering the conditional form, path-aware validation, the dedupe guard, the approval queue, the audit trail, and the CSV export — plus a fallback path so you can build the whole thing today even with no integration to your current system.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This isn't a throwaway form. The plan builds in the controls that make ops leaders trust an internal tool:
- Login so only your team can use it.
- Row-level security so people only ever see their own organization's submissions.
- A complete audit trail — who submitted, who approved, what changed, and when.
- A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate — a submission becomes a work item only after a person reviews and approves it. The form drafts; a human commits.
- Duplicate guards so the same request can't slip through twice.
Who it's for
PMO and operations teams whose intake form has ballooned into a 40-field monster nobody finishes — and anyone who's tired of maintaining a pile of near-identical forms or chasing requesters for the handful of answers that actually mattered. If you can edit a spreadsheet, you can run this.
You've got this — paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.