Print Forms
Print Forms is where your company designs the documents it prints and emails — the order form, the packing slip that comes out of a shipment, and the invoice. You describe the form you want in plain English, or hand over the form you print today and let the AI rebuild it, then publish it so everyone in the company can print it. Open it from Reports › Print Forms in the workbench toolbar, or go straight to the Print Forms tab.
Nothing here replaces anything until you say so. Every company starts with Backbone MRP’s own standard documents, and they keep printing exactly as before until you publish a form of your own.
Print sites: where a form gets printed
A print site is a place in the app you print from. Every form belongs to exactly one, which is what decides where it shows up and what information it can put on the page. Choose the site you are working on with the selector at the top of the Print Forms tab.
- Order Form — printed from the order editor, for order confirmations and acknowledgements. A form here can show the order and its line items, the customer, the parts, your customer-specific part numbers, and the ship-to location.
- Shipment Form — printed from the shipment editor, for packing slips and shipping documents. Everything the order form can show, plus the shipment and its line items.
- Invoice Form — printed from the invoice editor. Everything above, plus the invoice and its line items.
A shipment form can see the order as well as the shipment on purpose: a packing slip is read against what was ordered, so it routinely shows the order number, the customer’s PO, and what is still outstanding. An invoice form sees the whole chain — order, shipment, invoice — because invoices routinely cite all of it.
Starting a form
Two buttons on the Print Forms tab start a new form.
New Form from Example — the fastest way in
If you already print a form you like, start here. Click New Form from Example and choose a PDF, PNG, or JPEG of it — an export, a screenshot, or a scan of a paper copy all work. The AI reads the layout, headings, column order, and wording and rebuilds them as a Backbone form, mapping each field it recognizes to the nearest piece of real data.
- Click New Form from Example and pick the site the form belongs to.
- Choose the file. It is sent to the AI, which takes a while — this is a careful read of a whole document, not a quick lookup.
- The editor opens with the result already proposed. Review it and click Apply, or discard it and try again.
New Form — start from a template
New Form starts from Backbone’s starter template for the site, which already lays out a company header, the customer blocks, the document fields, and a line-item table. Give it a name and the editor opens on it.
Editing a form in plain English
The editor is a conversation on the left and a preview on the right. Type what you want changed — “move the PO number next to the order number and make the line-item table header bold” — and send it. The AI proposes a change; nothing is saved until you click Apply.
- Preview renders the form against one of your real records, so you are looking at your own customers, parts, and prices rather than sample text. It starts on your most recent one; click Preview with and type a document number — an order number on an order form, a shipment number on a packing slip, an invoice number on an invoice — to work against a particular document instead.
- Report Design (XML) shows the design file itself, and lets you edit it directly if you would rather change one attribute by hand than describe it.
- AI Response shows the full reply, including anything the AI said around the design. It is where to look when a change did not come out as expected.
The model drop-down chooses which AI model does the work, and your choice is remembered between sessions. Your company’s AI settings and API key apply here as they do everywhere else — see AI Settings.
Draft and published: the one rule that matters
Editing a form changes nothing for anybody else. Your work is a draft, visible only to you, no matter how many times you save it. Only Publish makes a form available to print, and what gets published is a frozen copy taken at that moment.
- Everyone keeps printing the last published version — including you — until you publish again. A half-finished edit can never reach the shop floor or a customer.
- Unpublish withdraws a form from the Print menus. The draft survives, so you can keep working on it and publish again later.
- Delete removes a form entirely.
The forms list shows each form’s status, when it was published, and by whom.
The standard document
Backbone MRP’s own document for each site — the standard order form, packing slip, and invoice — is listed alongside your forms, marked Enabled or Disabled. It behaves like the others with two differences: it cannot be edited or deleted, and it is enabled for every company from the start.
Once you have a published form of your own, you can disable the standard document so nobody prints it by accident. Backbone will not let you disable it while it is the only option left — there must always be at least one document people can print.
Printing, viewing, and emailing a published form
Published forms appear on the document itself. Open an order, shipment, or invoice and look at the Print, View, and Email buttons in the toolbar: each has a small arrow beside it.
- Click the arrow to see every form published for that document, alongside the standard one.
- Pick one. It is used immediately — and remembered as your choice.
- From then on the button itself uses your choice on every document of that kind you open, until you pick a different one.
Print sends the form to your printer, View opens exactly the same document on screen first, and Email attaches it to the message to your customer — see Emailing Documents. The last entry in each menu, Customize…, opens the Print Forms tab at that document’s site.