How about we all stop tracking Incidents in these ridiculous oversized Excel spreadsheets? They are clunky, hard to use, and share too much info with everyone. I can’t tell you how many customers have shown me their current solution and there is a whole lot of PII for anyone to steal. 😢
Today let me show an example of an Incident Reporting app based off of some customer apps and discussions we have had. Nothing too elaborate but hopefully gets your mind going on what is possible when you build your own custom solution using Power Apps.
With solutions like this we focus on a few things:
• Ease of use, anyone should be able to pick up the app and use it, no training required
• Well structured and secured data, what could does it do to collect the data if you can’t keep it safe and generate reports on it later
• The ability to capture photos and witness in a structured, related manner
• Follow our business needs, too often when using off the shelf solutions the process follows the software, here we make the software follow the business process
Okay. That is enough of the setup, let’s see it. And speaking of seeing it, if you want to see the app in action then check out the video Power Apps Advanced Example: Modern Incident Reporting. The video shows the working demo and some of the code behind the scenes.
Incident Reporting Apps Walkthrough
Below is a break down of all of the screens and some key details. Remember with Power Apps you can make the app anything you want, so this is meant to inspire you, not dictate to you how it all works.
Mobile App Welcome Screen
Often Incidents happen away from your desk (unless you are clumsy like me🤕) so we often build these apps as Mobile apps. That way they can be opened on any modern phone or tablet and get to work. The Warehouse, the breakroom, the job site, or even your desk, the app is always ready to go.
Creating a New Incident
By making it quick and simple to log incidents—even in high-stress situations—this app helps ensure more complete data capture, which leads to better reporting and faster resolution of safety hazards.
After clicking New the user is taken to one screen that will prompt them for the information they need to capture. All fields are optional in this example. The goal often with these apps is to encourage them to get as much information as quickly as possible. When reporting on a spill it isn’t critical but this same app will be used to report a traffic accident or other possible stressful events. Getting as many details as possible is the key.
Some customers choose also to have different logic when they choose high severity. So while only the safety coordinator is notified when there are trip hazards, the entire executive tier is notified when there is an injury requiring medical attention or worse. The great part about Power Apps is you can easily add that custom logic based on your business.
One other nice thing about this screen. When you go to enter Location that is usually simple so you just have a small line, but when you enter Description you actually click the + and you are taken to a full screen for getting the description entered. This encourages maximum detail.
Adding Witnesses with Proper Relationships
With Power Apps connected to Dataverse, sensitive data like personal information can be secured with role-based permissions. This means only authorized personnel can access PII—unlike Excel files that often get emailed around without restrictions.
Sometimes there are zero witnesses of the mystery spill in the breakroom; sometimes there are 25 of Timmy falling off the table with a lampshade on his head at the company holiday party. 🤣 Either way, the app needs to be flexible unlike that Excel solution that just has a bunch of columns.
Here they can add as many witnesses as available. Each one will be stored as its own record in a separate table and then related back to the incident. Your typical parent child data model. Faster and more flexible for reporting. Awesome. Oh yeah, and unlike that Excel solution we can actually secure the child data, like PII. Do you know how often we see that type of data leaked in the XLSX file? 😲
Remember, if you need help with building this Incident Reporting Apps, or any other ideas you have we are happy to help. Contact
A picture is worth 1000 words
Like witnesses sometimes you need 1 picture and sometimes you need a dozen. So once again there is a flexible, many to one relationship for photos. Also, while this screen just grabs the image, keep in mind that adding metadata or notes about the image would be very straightforward. Sometimes 1000 words doesn’t cut it so letting the user add notes can be helpful. You could even add the ability to add annotations but now I am just showing off.
Submitting the Incident Report
Now that they have captured all of the information it is time to Submit it. This will save all of the data and establish all of the relationships so you can easily report on it later. But it doesn’t have to end there.
On Submit you could add logic to do a multitude of things:
• Send an email to the safety team with a link directly to this incident (deep linking)
• Generate a PDF of the incident for saving or submitting to insurance
• Have notifications or alerts go based on the priority or severity of the event
• Start an approval or assignment process to get incident taken care of
Once again, the great part about Power Apps is that you can make the software do what the business process dictates, not the other way around.
View Existing
By breaking things up into two apps you build a best of class solution for each app, instead of a big crazy app for everyone. This approach not only keeps the reporting app simple and user-friendly but also ensures that the management app can offer more advanced functionality tailored to supervisors and administrators.
In the demo app there is a simple screen for finding and viewing existing Incident Reports. Often with this screen you would limit the incidents to the ones submitted by the logged in user or for their area of responsibility.
You will notice that this app does not have edit capabilities. That was a design decision for the demo. Typically you will have 2 apps. One app for easily submitting the Incident Report and then another for responding to and managing the incident. The management app is often a desktop app because you do that work at your desk, not in the field.
By breaking things up into two apps you build a best of class solution for each app, instead of a big crazy app for everyone. Remember when we started, one of our goals was to make our reporting app as easy to use as possible without training. Adding a bunch of editing and other functionality they don’t need just clutters things up.
Closing thoughts
Incident reporting apps are very common in the businesses we talk to. By building a straight forward Power Apps app to manage the process they get better data and better outcomes based on their business needs, not what the 3rd party app can do.
If you need help with this or any Power Apps project let us know. Click that Contact button and we will be happy to give you a hands-on demo of this app or discuss any of the thousands of business solutions we have built for customers that range from a one woman shop in Alabama to multiple companies across the globe who are on the top of the Fortune list.