Companies are always looking for ways to be more productive and increase efficiency within teams. One solution you might not have come across yet is online forms. Forms are easy to use, and they streamline a number of different business objectives—communication, data entry, and file sharing, to name a few. To help you get started, here are 10 ways using forms can increase your team’s overall productivity:

#1: Save Time With Templates

You don’t need to spend hours designing and developing your own forms. With online form builders, you can create a form in minutes with drag-and-drop features and pre-made templates. You can spice things up with customization if you want to, but typically, there’s no coding required to put together a clean, functional form.

#2: Integrate Everything

The best online form options integrate with web tools like MailChimp, PayPal, and more to streamline your workflow. Take advantage of everything these integrations have to offer, and you’ll be the most productive person at the office.

#3: Schedule Meetings

Are you sick of scheduling meetings through a long, back-and-forth email chain? Many form options integrate with calendar plugins and apps such as Google Calendar, iCalendar, and Outlook, so you can schedule meetings, share your availability, and add attendees to events right in your form. Talk about efficiency!

#4: Analyze Data in One Place

With online forms, there’s no need to spend hours of your day (or multiple days) plugging and chugging response data into a spreadsheet. Many form platforms offer robust, data-crunching analytics that allow you to measure and track your form analytics every time you log in.

#5: Survey at Scale

Instead of manually emailing or interviewing members of your team one by one, you can save time by sending out a form. For example, HR teams could use online forms for PTO request forms, employee satisfaction surveys, and job applications.

#6: Receive Notifications On-the-Go

When someone fills out your online form, you can adjust your settings to receive notifications right from your phone or through your email. Instead of spending time logging into the form platform to check responses, you can keep track of them in real time.

#7: Say Goodbye to Paper

Are you still using paper handouts for performance reviews, employee surveys, or contracts? It’s time to go paperless once and for all. Use online forms to streamline your processes and save some trees along the way.

#8: Speed Up Data Entry and Approval

Instead of passing around the latest version of a spreadsheet via email, online forms collect data automatically. Then, you can share the data with any team members who need it and export the data to Excel and Word. You can also set up specific approvers for a form, which helps streamline submission approval processes.

#9: Grab Electronic Signatures

Instead of printing out documents, signing them manually, and then scanning them back into your system to finalize a contract or agreement, add an electronic signature field to your form. This saves you and your team tons of time and a lot of paper.

#10: Send Fewer Emails

Some research suggests that email takes up almost 30% of a worker’s day. Minimize your time spent on email by using forms to help you communicate. How many times do you—or does someone on your team—forget to include an attachment on an email? Using a form to submit a project, proposal, or other submission keeps everything you need in one place and makes the transfer of information easy.

If you thought the only use you had for forms was to fill them out, I hope I’ve shown you how much more they can do. Take these 10 productivity tips and use them to help your team do what it does with more ease and less effort.

Formstack is an easy-to-use online form builder that makes it simple to capture and manage data. Create and publish branded web forms with no coding knowledge using the tool’s drag-and-drop builder. Embed published forms on your website or content management system (CMS), or share them using a unique link. All responses submitted on Formstack forms are stored in a user’s secure online account, making it easy to share data or export it to a PDF or Excel Doc. Formstack integrates with more than 35 other web tools, eliminating the need to manually transfer data to other applications. Learn more about how Formstack can save time through automated data processes at www.formstack.com.