Prior to launching Formwork, we did a lot of regulatory consulting. It always was our goal to be a profitable company, and doing consulting helped us bring in enough money each month to pay our salaries, rent, mansions, airplanes, casino trips, .. oh wait, regulatory consulting isn’t actually that profitable. Well, it’s profitable for sure, but given that we tend to be faster and (therefore) cheaper than our competitors, we won’t be flying a whole lot of private jets any time soon.
Where was I.. ah, talking about consulting: It’s a huge pain to share documents with clients. I mean, many “modern” companies have started using Google Drive so you don’t have to send around old-school Word documents via email. But still, Google Drive forces you to juggle lots of folder names in your head when trying to remember where your client files were.
And of course I won’t even start talking about Confluence and Jira. It’s just hell – Confluence is a comically slow document editor, but the main problem is that Atlassian tools spam your inbox full of emails until you give up by hoisting a white flag atop your laptop. It still fills me with a deep sense of wonder why any company nowadays would select these tools without being blackmailed. I’m sure I’m missing something there.
Now, when we developed Formwork, we thought: Can we solve this problem and use this to make our consulting more efficient? And the answer is yes! In Formwork, our clients can add us as “consultants” to their accounts, and that enables us to collaborate with them on their documents, including reviewing and signing stuff. So cool.
Here’s how it looks. First, you select a company which has given you consulting access.
And then you see Formwork in the same way they see it, except that you see a huge notice at the top that you’re currently consulting them.
Now, why am I telling you all this?
Because today, we’re shipping our consulting feature to anyone who wants to use Formwork, including you. That’s right, if you’re a consultant or work with other companies in any way, Formwork is now (probably?) the only eQMS software which allows you to collaborate with multiple companies in an intuitive way.
So – no need to juggle Google Drive folders in your head, and no need to purge your mailbox from Atlassian email spam yet again.
Finally – you guessed it – consulting is a Formwork Pro feature. No surprises there because it’s quite an advanced feature, and adding it to the free Community Edition didn’t feel right. So, if you’re a consultant, you need Formwork Pro, but all your clients can still use the free Community Edition. We think that’s a fair model.
Getting access to the consulting feature still requires us to manually give you access. So, if you’re interested, get your Formwork account, click “Get in touch” in the bottom right corner and let us know that you’d like to use the consulting feature.
I hope you like it as much as we do!
