Starting from a ready-made form, or describing one and letting AI draft it.
You rarely need to build a form from a blank page. Start from one of the ready-made starters, from a template your firm has saved, or describe what you need and let AI draft the fields for you. Whichever you choose, the result is an ordinary form you can change however you like.
Cartenda comes with starters for the forms each kind of firm sends most, grouped by the kind of firm:
To use one:
A new form opens in the builder with everything already on the page. See Building a form.
Each starter also has a page in the template library on our website. If you are signed in, Use this template free there opens New form in your current workspace with that starter picked out.
If none of them fits, select Build my own beside the starters. It opens a blank form, where you can describe what you need or build it from a PDF you already use.
To start from a form your firm already has, such as last year's, choose it under Copy a form and select Copy. Archived forms are listed too. The copy is a new draft: its clients, responses and link stay with the original.
Once a form works well for your firm, save it so colleagues can start from it.
The template keeps the questions as they are now. Changing the original form later leaves the template as it was. To change a template, start a form from it, edit that form and save it as a template again.
Your templates appear under Your templates when anyone selects New form. Saving, renaming and deleting templates is held to owners, admins and roles with Build and change forms, because a template changes what every colleague's next form starts from. Deleting a template does not affect forms already started from it.
On a new, empty form, the Build tab opens with Describe your form above the fields.
Drafting usually takes under a minute. A clock beside the button counts the time. If it runs longer than usual, the card says so and gives the time it will stop by; if it can't finish, it stops, says so, and leaves your form as it was. One draft is written for a form at a time: asked for again from another tab, or by a colleague, while one is underway, the card says a draft is already being written. The fields appear in the builder with a short note on what was drafted, sometimes with a name, introduction and confirmation message too.
The draft also fills in what it can of each question's settings. A question about a date of birth, an employer or a home address has Keep on client set, for the client or their spouse or partner. A request for a particular document, such as a driver's license, has This should be set to that kind, so a client who uploads the wrong thing is told. If you asked for the client to sign, Ask for a signature is turned on. If you said someone besides the client answers part of it, such as a spouse who fills in their own details, the draft adds them under Who answers what and sets Answered by on their sections; the roles your form already has are always kept. Check each of these as you review the draft. See Several people on one request.
Nothing is sent to anybody. Review every question, and select Undo AI changes if the draft is not what you meant.
The draft is written in the language your form is written in. If the form is also offered in Spanish, new and reworded questions are then translated, marked AI translated for you to check. See Building a form.
If you have a questionnaire as a PDF, or only on paper, the AI can build the form from it. A scanned PDF works, and so do photos of the pages taken on your phone.
An upload goes into your firm documents and is checked before it can be used. Photos (JPG, PNG or HEIC) are saved there as one PDF, a page for each photo in the order you choose them, so a form of several pages stays one document. The chosen file is shown under the description box, so you can check its name before you select Build form: the draft follows whichever file is chosen. Select Remove to build from your description alone. A long PDF can take a few minutes to draft from. Uploading is held to owners, admins and roles with Build and change forms.
On a form that already has fields, the card reads Change with AI. Ask for a change, such as "add a section for spouse details", and select Update form. The AI revises the fields you have rather than starting again, and Undo AI changes puts them back.
If the form is already open to clients, the change is saved as unpublished changes, and clients see it only once you select Publish.
Each draft counts 2 of your plan's AI checks for the month, including changes to an existing form. Reading documents uses the same checks. Past your allowance, drafting carries on and each check is billed, unless you set a monthly AI cap. If drafting pauses, at your cap or at the end of a trial's checks, the card says so. You can still edit the form by hand. See Plans and Usage and allowances.
Your description, the form as it stands and any document you choose are sent to a Claude model on Amazon Bedrock in US regions to write the draft. No client information is involved, and nothing is used to train a model.
Still stuck? Write to hello@cartenda.com and a person will answer.