One of the more frustrating things home inspectors face in report writing is not being able to locate a pre-made narrative comment that you know exists somewhere in your software. While no software can make every comment instantly available, smart software will provide an inspector with multiple ways to sort, sift through, organize and recall your narratives. One of my favorite tools at the moment is the Inspector Only Notes checkbox.
Inspector Only Notes are designed to show up in the back end of your report writing platform, but they are there for the inspector only, so using this tool, you are creating checkboxes inside your reporting system that are seen only by the inspector; they do not show up in the finished report if you do not want them to. Inspector Only Notes can be distinguished by their italics font – see the attached screenshot below. here the italic font and checkbox are an orange color, you know that there is a narrative observation connected to the box.
This allows an inspector to make their most frequently used narratives accessible by simply clicking a box. This video shows you how this can be accomplished.
Inspector Only Notes and Check Boxes
With this approach, you can set up each section in your report to have your most frequently used comments available at the check of a box. Even better, all of these narratives can be easily customized and updated. This video shows how you can create a new narrative observation or alter and save and existing narrative.
Saving or Altering a Narrative Observation
The goal at ScribeWarte is to deliver a rich and well-written default library you can use to get started. But we are really hoping that over time, you find it easy to modify and hone the language to suit your voice, your inspection style, and your region: the more you use ScribeWare, the more it starts to suit your business, your style, and your region for a perfect report-writing solution.
The default library is written for a heating climate zone and also includes language for earthquake country. Obviously, much of the library will work anywhere, but we would expect and encourage every user to modify the report to suit their region. The default library is also written in English and for US codes and construction practices. Users in other countries should expect the need to make more wide-ranging adjustments to the default library.
I hope this helps. Please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions, ideas, or comments.
