Understanding Requests

Applies to:All roles

A request is how a resident asks the people who run your community for something: a repair, an approval for a home project, or an answer to a question. Residents file and follow their requests under My Requests. Your request team works them in the Inbox.

Request forms

Every request is filed on a request form. Each community starts with three:

• General Inquiry Form — questions and anything that doesn’t fit another form
• Work Order Request Form — repairs and maintenance
• Architectural Review Request Form — home projects that need the board’s approval, with fields for the start date, completion date, and contractor

Owners and Admins can copy and adjust these forms or build new ones. A form can require approval: its requests end with a board decision, Approved or Declined, instead of Completed. See Creating Request Forms.

Who works requests

Owners, Admins, and Agents are the request team. They see the Inbox, reply, change statuses, and assign requests. Board Members don’t see the Inbox; they file requests the same way residents do. Your association can also give a custom role access to requests.

By default, the whole team sees every request. A custom form can be limited to selected team roles, so an architectural committee, for example, sees only the requests filed on its form. See Choosing Who Sees a Form’s Requests.

Whoever files a request, and anyone added to it to stay informed, always sees it, whatever the form’s access.

Statuses

A line of steps at the top of each request shows where it stands:

• General forms: Submitted → Under review → Scheduled → Completed
• Forms that need approval: Submitted → Under review → Board decision, which becomes Approved or Declined

Status	What it means
Draft	Saved but not sent. Only the person who started it sees it.
Submitted	Sent and waiting for the team to pick it up.
Under review	Someone on the team is working on it.
Waiting on you	The team needs an answer before it can go on. The team sees this as Waiting on and the requester’s first name.
Scheduled	The work is scheduled.
Approved / Declined	The board’s decision on a form that needs approval.
Completed	The request is done.
Withdrawn	The requester canceled it.

Approved, Declined, Completed, and Withdrawn close a request: nobody can reply to it any more. The team can still add internal notes, and can reopen an approved, declined, or completed request.

What happens automatically

Each form has three timers, set by your Owner or Admin:

• A request on a form that needs approval is approved automatically if it is still Submitted after the approval period.
• A request that is Waiting on the requester closes when they don’t reply within the close period — as Completed, or as Declined on a form that needs approval. Until then, the requester gets a daily reminder.
• The team gets a daily reminder for every request that is still Submitted after the expected response time.

Who gets emailed

The person who filed the request, and anyone else added to it, get an email when:

• The request is submitted (the person who filed it only)
• The team replies
• The status changes. A change to an open status is sent two minutes later and skipped if the team replies in that time, so a reply and a status change arrive as one email. A request that closes is emailed at once.

The team gets an email when a request is submitted, when the requester replies, and when a request is withdrawn. Once someone is assigned, those emails go to the assignee only; before that, they go to everyone on the team who can see the request. Internal notes never send an email.

Where to go next

• Need something from the board? See Submitting a Request.
• Checking on a request you sent? See Tracking Your Requests.
• Working requests for your community? See Managing the Request Inbox.
• Setting up the forms residents use? See Creating Request Forms.