Introduction to Advancing and Advance Forms

Advancing is how BackOps collects, organizes, and acts on the information you need from the people you work with in order to run an event.

The term advancing comes from the music industry, where teams advance an artist by gathering technical, logistical, and hospitality requirements ahead of a show. BackOps generalizes the idea so it works for any kind of event. Corporate, TV, film, and photo teams often call the same thing forms or data forms, and the two words mean the same thing here.

At its core, advancing answers one question: what do we need to know from each collaborator to deliver this event?

Why Advancing Matters

In most event workflows, advancing is manual, inconsistent, hard to reuse, and hard to summarize. A rider arrives as a PDF, a vendor answers half the questions in an email thread, and the catering counts live in someone's spreadsheet. Even with custom forms, the result is a pile of disconnected answers that still has to be retyped into plans, orders, and day sheets.

BackOps treats advancing as structured planning data from the start. Every answer is tied to a collaborator, a form section, and often an area or an activity. Requests for equipment flow into procurement. Answers can be reviewed, approved, tracked as tasks, and rolled up across the whole event. The work of collecting information and the work of acting on it happen in the same place.

How Advancing Is Structured

Advancing is built in three layers, which gives teams both consistency and flexibility.

Module templates are the building blocks. Each one defines a single form section made of instructional content, questions, and request tables. A "Catering" module, a "Technical Requirements" module, and a "Credentials" module are all examples. Build a module once and reuse it wherever it is needed.

Advance templates are named, ordered sets of module templates. An advance template packages several modules into a ready-to-assign structure, with a default due date and settings for each module. A "Standard Artist Advance" might combine technical, hospitality, and logistics modules.

Advances are what collaborators actually fill in. An advance belongs to one collaborator, is usually started from an advance template, and can be scoped to an area, an activity, or both. It can still be adjusted after it is assigned.

Your organization can also keep a library of standard module and advance templates, which events copy and adapt. That way the forms your team has refined over many events are available to every new one.

flowchart LR
    L["Organization library"] -->|"Add from org library"| MT["Module templates"]
    MT --> AT["Advance templates"]
    AT -->|"Assign"| A["Advance for a collaborator"]
    A --> R["Answers and requests"]
    R --> P["Procurement"]
    R --> T["Tasks"]
    R --> M["Advance Manager"]

You invest in building module and advance templates once, and every collaborator after that is fast and consistent.