App configuration: overview and how layers resolve

App configuration is where you shape what the survey wizard, sealed-record overview and report actually contain — organised into five tabs sharing one draft and one save.

What it is

App configuration holds every wizard-section, report-section, hazard-profile and standard-wording setting, spread across five tabs: Data collection, Hazards, Survey content, Resident, and Costs & references (each covered in its own article). All five tabs read and write the same underlying draft, so switching tabs never loses an unsaved edit, and one Save changes/Discard pair covers everything across all five at once.

How to do it

1. Open Settings → App configuration.
2. Pick a tab and make your changes — an amber Unsaved changes banner appears the moment anything differs from what’s saved.
3. Click Save changes to apply everything you’ve changed across every tab in one action, or Discard to revert all of it back to what was last saved.
4. Try to navigate away with unsaved changes and the portal asks you to confirm first, so an edit is never lost by accident.

How it integrates

Settings here apply to every surveyor the moment you save — except a survey already open, which keeps the configuration it started with until the next survey begins; this is a deliberate freeze, not a bug. Configuration resolves in a fixed, ascending order of precedence: your organisation’s base App configuration is the floor everyone inherits, a contractor organisation’s own override (if any) sits above that for their jobs, a specific person’s override sits above the contractor’s, and a specific work order’s override — the narrowest scope — wins last. Scoped overrides, found further down this same page, is where you set those narrower layers; a section this base configuration hides can never be restored by a narrower scope, only narrowed further.

Common problems

• I saved a change and it didn’t reach a survey already in progress. That’s expected — a survey freezes its configuration when the surveyor opens it; the change applies from their next survey onward.
• A scoped override isn’t taking effect. Check whether the same section is already hidden at a broader scope (organisation or contractor) — a narrower scope can only hide further, never restore something a broader one already removed.
• A tab’s content looks unexpectedly empty. Check whether every section within it has been hidden on the Data collection tab — that tab is the organisation-wide floor every other tab builds on.