Forms

Crew members fill forms on the vessel, while office staff review, approve, and manage form submissions from shore. The system handles the complete handoff between ship and office — submissions flow from vessel to shore for review, and approvals or rejections flow back to the crew.

Both ship and office users see the same form with the same fields, but their roles in the workflow differ. Ship crews create drafts and submit for approval.

Office reviewers see pending submissions across the fleet and can approve, reject with a reason, or discard them, and can hand a form to another crew member on board when the person who started it has left. Forms work the same in the ship app and the office app.

Assign forms to specific vessels and crew ranks with granular control. Send a form to ship groups or single ships, and choose which of 51 onboard ranks fill it in. A ship that joins a group later gets the group's forms automatically.

Crew in the responsible ranks get a newsfeed item when a form is assigned, and only crew in the rank that started a form can save, send or delete it. Assignments support both one-time and recurring schedules.

Not every form is filled on board. Give a form an office assignment and the user groups you choose fill it ashore: they start it, save it, send it, and hand it to a colleague when needed. A user group approves it, with one of or all of its members, as set on the form.

Office forms run on a schedule like ship forms, with notices to the people filling them when one is due soon or overdue. Any published ship form can be copied as a new office form, and the other way round.

Not every form belongs in a browser. Navatom supports four form types: web forms built in the visual form builder, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PDFs. Each type has its own creation, editing, and distribution workflow.

Web forms use the drag-and-drop builder with 17 field types. Word, Excel and PDF forms open in the built-in document editor, or are downloaded, filled and uploaded where a vessel works without it.

When a Word, Excel or PDF form is approved, a PDF copy is kept with it. Choose the right format for every use case, from daily checklists to complex inspection reports.

Build forms with 17 field types designed for maritime operations. Input fields include single-line text, number, multi-line text, date, time and star rating. Selection fields cover toggle, select, multi-select, checkbox group and radio group for structured choices.

The question field captures Yes, No and N/A answers, and you choose which of the three it offers: the bread and butter of maritime checklists. Table fields handle structured data entry with rows and columns.

Layout fields (paragraph, header and space) let you add instructions, section dividers, and visual structure to your forms. Rich text fields capture formatted text with inline styling.

When a filled checklist turns up a problem, the deficiency, non-conformity, near miss, accident or technical finding records the form it was raised from, down to the question that failed. On the ship or at the office, pick the form, the filled copy and the question.

The filled form lists every issue raised from it, so an auditor can follow a "No" on a checklist to the corrective action that closed it.

Forms can be attached directly to maintenance jobs in the Planned Maintenance System and to risk assessments. When a maintenance job requires a structured form, such as an inspection checklist or test record, the crew fill it in as part of the job's work report.

Risk assessment integration lets you attach forms to risk evaluations, capturing structured data as part of the assessment process. Each linked form belongs to the vessel of the job or assessment it is attached to, and the form shows where it is attached.

Form definitions follow a controlled six-stage lifecycle: draft, in review, completed, published, revised and deprecated. Only published forms can be assigned to vessels and filled by crew. Each transition enforces validation and records who approved or rejected the change.

The lifecycle prevents unfinished or unapproved forms from reaching the fleet. Development versions let your team iterate on form design without affecting live assignments.

Revision creates a new development copy while keeping the current released version active until the revision is approved.

Filled forms follow a seven-stage lifecycle: draft, awaiting ship approval, ship rejected, awaiting company approval, company rejected, company approved, and discarded. The lifecycle adapts to the configured approval flow, skipping stages that do not apply.

Crew members fill forms and submit them for approval. Ship officers review and approve or reject.

Office staff provide final sign-off when required. A rejected form goes back with the reason, and can be returned to draft and sent again.

The lifecycle ensures every form submission follows the exact approval chain configured for its assignment.

Every form definition maintains a complete version history with version numbers, development versions, and revision tracking. When you revise a released form, the system creates a new development copy with an incremented version number while the current version remains active.

The changelog lists every published version and when it was replaced or deprecated, with a preview of each.

A reason is recorded when a form is first published and with each new version, providing a complete audit trail of why the form evolved over time. Assignments carry over to the new version.

Schedule a review for each published form: first due on a date, then every set number of months, with an optional notice before each due date. The people on the form's approval route get a notice when a review is due soon and again when it is overdue.

Record what each review found: no change, revision needed, or withdraw, with a note. Each form keeps its review history, with every due date, who reviewed it and when, and what they found.

Approved forms are archived by ship, listed by ship or as one list, for any date range. When a Word, Excel or PDF form is approved, a PDF copy is kept with it, so the record reads the same years later.

On board, a new web form can start from the values of the last approved copy, so a monthly checklist only needs what changed since last month.

Edit Word, Excel and PDF forms directly in the browser with the built-in document editor. It opens your files with full formatting support: tables, styles, formulas, headers, and footers render just as they do on the desktop.

Each editing session is opened with a signed token that carries the user and the document, so only authorized users can change a form. A forced save keeps the work after any interruption, and the editor follows your light or dark theme.

No desktop software or file downloads required: template creation and filling happen entirely in the browser.

Print any filled form as a PDF with its values, at the office or on board. Choose the color theme, orientation, page size, margins and watermark, and whether to include comments.

Word and Excel forms print with your company's headers and footers, filled or blank. The output preserves form layout and field responses in a clean, professional format suitable for management reviews and external audits.

Monitor your form program with six dashboard widgets: forms awaiting my approval, the same grouped by vessel, all forms awaiting approval, scheduled forms that are overdue, completed forms, and my drafts.

The by-vessel widget lets approvers prioritize by ship, and the overdue widget shows which scheduled forms were not filled in on time.

My drafts ensures in-progress forms are not forgotten. Drill down from any widget to the underlying form data.

26 KPIs follow scheduled forms from deadline to approval: the share sent and approved on time, forms overdue or never completed, and the median days to fill a form, to approve it on board, to approve it in the office and end to end. Usage KPIs show how many templates each vessel has been assigned and how many of the templates in force a vessel actually sent.

Quality KPIs show forms sent back, forms right first time, the days a returned form takes to come back and form requests discarded. Template control KPIs show forms sent on a template version already replaced, days from template draft to release and reviews done on schedule, and two monitor-only KPIs look for web forms with copied answers or sent less than a minute after they were started.

Organize forms with a flexible labeling system. Create hierarchical label structures with sub-labels for multi-level categorization: Safety, Compliance, Operational, Environmental, or any taxonomy that matches your organization.

The published forms list is grouped by label, at the office and on the ship app, so the right template is quick to find.

The hierarchical structure lets you drill from broad categories to specific form groups without a rigid folder system.

Add comments at every stage of the form lifecycle — during definition development, review, and request processing. Comments support add, edit, and delete operations with full user attribution and timestamps. Notes capture additional context that does not belong in form fields.

File attachments support evidence uploads on every filled form. Attach reference documents, images, supporting materials, and verification evidence directly to the form record, with who uploaded each file and when.