How Advancing Works from Collection to Approval

Once you know the three layers of advancing (module templates, advance templates, and advances), it helps to see how they connect to the rest of the event. This page covers the full picture: what collaborators provide, how the production team reviews it, and where the answers go next.

Flexible Information Collection

Because advances are assembled from module templates, you can build a different advance for each kind of collaborator without starting from scratch. For example:

• Advancing speakers on presentation needs
• Advancing artists on technical and hospitality requirements
• Advancing vendors on services, equipment, or staffing
• Advancing venues on capacities, access, and infrastructure

Advancing works as well for corporate events, conferences, and internal projects as it does for concerts and festivals.

Internal and External Advancing

Advancing is not limited to outside companies. A collaborator in BackOps can be an internal department as easily as a vendor, so you can use the same process to plan room setups, equipment needs, production spaces, and session-level requirements. Internal planning decisions then live in the same system as external requests, instead of in side channels.

Scoping Advances to Areas and Activities

An advance can be scoped to one area, one activity, or both. Scoping puts the advance where people work. An area's Advance tab lists every advance scoped to that area, and an activity's Advances tab does the same for the activity. The area's day sheet includes every advance scoped to it, with its answers.

This means a stage manager can work from the stage instead of opening each collaborator. If ten bands are advancing the same stage, all ten advances appear together on that stage's area page. If a band's backline advance is scoped to the Mainstage area and to their performance activity, the production team can find it from either the area or the schedule.

Turning Information Into Action

The Advance Manager is the event-level page that rolls advance answers up by module. If a Catering module was used in 30 advances, the Advance Manager shows one Catering table with all 30 collaborators' answers side by side, so you can review a large volume of answers without opening each collaborator.

You can also work from each collaborator's Advance tab, and from the area and activity pages described above. Each one shows only the advances that belong to it.

Review and Two-Stage Approval

Not every answer can be accepted as-is. The production team reviews answers to confirm they are correct and complete. Request line items can also go through a two-stage approval: an advance approval from the production side, and a resource approval from whoever will supply the item. Together they form a shared record of what was asked for, what was approved, and what was confirmed as deliverable.

Task Tracking

When task tracking is turned on for a module, BackOps creates tasks for the advance, the module, and each question and request block in it. Those tasks move through your task statuses as collaborators answer and reviewers review, so the production team gets a live task view of advancing without creating or updating anything by hand.

Closing the Loop

Answers do not stay inside the form. Asset requests appear on the procurement Requests tab, where they are approved and turned into resource needs. Collaborator and area day sheets include advance answers. Dynamic Docs can query advances, questions, and requests to build formatted documents for crews and clients. Instead of re-summarizing information in emails, the team works from the answers themselves.

flowchart TD
    C["Collaborator answers"] --> Rv["Review"]
    C --> Rq["Request line items"]
    Rq --> Ap["Advance approval"]
    Ap --> Ra["Resource approval"]
    Rq --> Pr["Procurement Requests"]
    Rv --> Tk["Tracked tasks move to Done"]
    C --> Rm["Advance Manager and day sheets"]

What Advancing Does Not Do Yet

There is no conditional logic, so every block in a module shows to every respondent. Questions cannot pick crew members, collaborators, areas, or activities. BackOps does not supply a library of starter templates; your organization builds its own. Advance answers do not yet create schedules, tasks, or other records on their own beyond the tracking tasks described above.