Channel Ports Forms Go Electronic

Channel Ports, the leading neutral Customs clearance agent in the UK, recently commissioned Fly Software to transform a large number of their hand-filled forms into electronic equivalents.

By taking advantage of Fly Software's form design service (now discontinued), Channel Ports were soon able to benefit from forms that could be filled in on a PC before being printed on plain paper or pre-printed stationery. Not only did Fly Software provide the design service they were also responsible for developing the form filling software (called InForm Filler) that Channel Ports use to fill in their forms.

"Our core business is selling licences for our form design software, InForm Designer," states Sam Jones, Marketing Manager for Fly Software. "However, we were more than happy to help Channel Ports convert their paper-based forms to e-forms."

A number of forms used by Channel Ports originated from HM Revenue & Customs, and despite being PDF documents, none of them had interactive form elements to enable them to be filled in electronically.

"For many of the HM Revenue & Customs forms, our form designers would take the PDF originals, import them into InForm Designer then overlay interactive form elements such as text boxes and radio buttons," comments Sam. "Other forms were redrawn from scratch prior to form elements being overlaid. When complete, the forms were ready to be filled in using our free to use InForm Filler software."

One challenge that faced Fly Software was getting filled in form content to align correctly when printed on pre-printed forms. "Form content was aligning for some Channel Ports printers but not for others," declares Sam. "To resolve this, our developers added a printer offset feature to InForm Filler. This allowed Channel Ports to define horizontal and vertical offsets for each of their printers, so printed content could be moved left or right, and up or down as required."