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Industry Starter Templates

A blank template builder is a hard place to start. You know the documents you collect, but turning them into a clean, well-labelled form — section by section, field by field — is its own job. FolioReady ships with starter templates for fourteen industries — seventy use cases in total — pre-built with the fields you'd expect, then polished by AI for your specific industry the moment you pick them. Five minutes after sign-up, you've got a stack of templates that already look like yours.

Step one of onboarding — pick the industry that fits your practice.

Why Use Starter Templates?

Skip the blank-page problem

Most form-builder tools start you on an empty canvas and ask you to imagine every field, every section, every hint. Starter templates flip that around: you begin from a working draft that already has the right fields, the right widths, the right required flags. From there, you're editing — not authoring — which is a much faster way to get to a template you actually want to send.

Fourteen industries, five use cases each

The catalog covers the practices we hear from most often — Accounting & Finance, Real Estate, Legal, Insurance, Financial Services, Healthcare, and ten more. Each industry comes with five common workflows, mixing inbound forms (your client submits to you) and outbound requests (you collect documents from a client or third party). A legal practice gets Client Intake, Document Collection, Witness Statement, Conflict Check, and Retainer Agreement. An accounting firm gets Document Collection, Client Intake, Audit Request, Expense Report, and Tax Questionnaire. Pick the ones you'll actually use — leave the rest.

AI polishes the labels for your industry

The skeletons start generic — "Document Type", "Notes", "Description". The moment you confirm your selection, FolioReady runs each template through the AI builder with one job: rewrite the field labels and hint text so they sound right for your industry. A "Document Type" select on a legal template comes back as "Document Category" with hint text mentioning evidence and contracts. The same field on an accounting template might come back tuned for tax forms. Same skeleton, industry-appropriate language.

Ready to send, ready to edit

Every starter is a real, working template the moment it's created — you can hit publish and start collecting the same day. Or open it in the builder and tweak: add a field, drop a section, rewrite a hint, add a reminder schedule. Because they're regular templates from the moment they land in your account, every customization tool in FolioReady works on them — the AI builder panel, drag-and-drop editing, conditional logic, the lot.

How It Works

1. Pick your industry

Right after you sign up, the onboarding wizard shows a grid of fourteen industry tiles. Pick the one that best matches your practice. There's no wrong answer — the catalog skews toward the most common starting point for that industry, but you'll be free to edit, delete, or add templates afterward.

The fourteen industries are: Creative Agency, Accounting & Finance, Real Estate, Recruiting, Legal, Insurance, Financial Services, Architecture, Consulting, Marketing, Education, Healthcare, Technology, and Construction.

2. Choose your use cases

After you pick an industry, the wizard shows the five starter templates for that industry. Each tile names the use case ("Client Intake", "Document Collection", "Audit Request"), tags it as inbound or outbound, and shows a one-line description of what it's for.

Step two — toggle the use cases you want. Pick one, two, or all five.

Tap each tile to add or remove it from your selection. You can pick one, all five, or anywhere in between. There's no requirement — if only two of the five fit your practice, take only two.

3. Review the picks

The preview step is a simple list: one row per template you've chosen, with the use case name and an inbound/outbound badge. It's a sanity check before the build — you can step back if you want to revise, or hit Confirm to start.

Preview — every template you'll get, with its inbound/outbound badge.

4. The AI polishes each template

Confirm and FolioReady starts building. For each template, you'll see a spinner while the AI rewrites the field labels and hint text in language specific to your industry. The structure of the template — sections, field types, required flags — is preserved exactly; only the wording changes. Polishing typically takes a few seconds per template.

Each template is polished in turn — you watch the progress as it happens.

If the AI polishing step fails for any reason — a slow network, a transient issue with the model — the underlying skeleton template is created anyway, with the generic labels intact. You won't lose a template to a hiccup.

5. Land on the manager dashboard

When the build finishes, you're dropped on the manager dashboard with all your new templates ready to use. Open any of them in the builder to edit, or send the first one straight away.

What's in a Starter

Each starter template includes:

Piece What's already filled in
Type Inbound or outbound, set per use case to match how you'd actually use it
Sections A starting section with a sensible name
Fields Five to eight pre-built fields per template — text, select, textarea, date, and currency types
Required flags The fields you genuinely need are marked required; the optional ones aren't
Field widths Half-width, third-width, or full-width set per field — so the form doesn't look like a single tall column
Hint text Industry-tuned guidance under each field after AI polishing
Select options Pre-built option lists where the field is a dropdown — Document Type, Project Type, Severity, etc.

Everything is editable. The starter is a launching pad, not a fixed format.

Tips

  • Pick three or four use cases, not all five. It's tempting to take everything, but a focused starting set is easier to refine. You can always come back to the catalog later — the same industry tiles are reachable from the template index.
  • Use the AI builder panel to extend a starter. Once a starter is in your account, opening it in the template builder gives you access to the AI builder panel — describe the changes you want in plain English ("add a section for vehicle details", "make this a multi-step form") and the panel applies them.
  • Delete what you won't use. If a starter doesn't quite fit, delete it rather than living with it. A clean template index makes it easier to spot the templates you actually rely on.
  • Outbound and inbound aren't fixed. A use case might ship as outbound, but if the way you use it is the reverse, you can change the type in the builder. The fields stay; the flow direction flips.
  • Run the wizard once per company. The wizard runs the first time you sign in to a new company workspace, before there are any templates. If you want a fresh round later, you can clear the templates manually and the wizard offers itself again — but most managers run it once at setup and build the rest by hand.