Every form keeps its responses in one place, so you can see who has replied, read what they sent, and export the lot. Here is how to find your way around.

Open a form from the "Forms" area and go to its responses. You will see two tabs: "Recipients" and "Answers".

"Recipients" lists everyone the form has been sent to, along with anyone who has filled it in from a public link. Each one shows its status at a glance, whether they have not started, are part way through, or have submitted. Across the top you also get a summary of your totals: total responses, completed, and in progress.

Click any recipient to open their full response and read their answers, laid out section by section as they saw it. Any table you asked them to fill in shows as a table, with your columns and however many rows they added, and you can expand it if it's a wide one. Questions they skipped are marked as no response rather than left blank, so you can see the difference between an empty answer and one you never asked for.

You can narrow the list using the status and delivery filters, or search by name, which helps when you are working through a long list.

If you sent the form to someone directly and they have not submitted yet, you can chase them up. Open the menu at the end of their row and choose "Copy link" to grab their personal form link, then paste it into an email or message so they can carry on where they left off. Submitted responses do not show this, as there is nothing left for them to complete. The same option is available from the Forms tab on the client's record.

"Answers" lays every response out in a grid, with your questions as the columns and one row per response. The "Responder" column is pinned to the left, so you can scroll across a wide form and always see whose answers you are looking at. As on the Recipients tab, each row shows whether it is not started, in progress or submitted.

For a form you sent to a client directly, the Responder column shows that person, because Socket already knows who you sent it to.

For a form completed from your public link, Socket has no way of knowing who filled it in, so it uses a friendly stand-in name like "Sage Owl" instead. That's why you'll sometimes see names in your list that mean nothing to you.

You can improve on that. Nominate one of your own questions, such as "Your name", as the one that identifies the responder, and their actual answer appears in the Responder column instead. It's set up on the form itself and covered in our Building your form guide. Worth doing on any public form where you want to find people by name later.

This is decided by how the form was sent, and it's worth getting right before you send anything out.

Sent to a client from Socket. Each recipient gets their own unique link, so Socket knows exactly who filled it in and files the response against that client. This holds when you send to several clients at once, as each one still gets their own link.

Completed from your public link. The same link is used by everyone, so Socket can't tell who is who and the response isn't attached to a client record. What they typed is still saved, but you'll be reading it rather than filtering by it.

Sending a form to one or several clients is covered in Sharing and sending your form.

If you have edited a form after it went live, its responses are kept separately for each version, including previous or archived versions you have since replaced. A version switcher lets you move between them, and the grid and the summary counts update to match the version you are viewing, so a version with fewer questions simply shows fewer columns. If responses seem to be missing, check which version you are viewing, as they may be sitting against an earlier version of the form. There is more on this in our Editing a live form and versions guide.

There isn't a combined view across every version, because each version can ask different questions, so there are no shared columns to line the answers up against. If you've published a new version and want to be sure nothing has been missed, check the previous version once as well.

From either tab you can export to Excel or CSV. The export respects whatever is on screen, so if you search or filter first, you get just the matching rows.

When you export the Answers grid, the recipient's email, their status and the date they submitted are added in before the question columns, so every row is easy to place.

💡 Searching or filtering before you export lets you pull just the responses you need, for example everyone who has submitted, rather than the whole list.

To keep or share a single client's answers on their own, open their response and download it as a PDF from the icon at the top of the panel.

Anything they uploaded comes with it, so a client who attached their last set of accounts or a copy of their passport arrives as one tidy bundle rather than a PDF you then have to go and find the files for. Useful for saving to your practice management system, passing to a colleague, or keeping on file for your AML records.

If your practice uses FYI, you can have response PDFs filed there for you rather than downloading and uploading them yourself.

It's a setting on each form, "Send responses to FYI", so switch it on for the forms where it makes sense. Once it's on, every submission is pushed to that client's FYI record as a PDF.

One thing to know: it only applies to clients who already exist in FYI. If a response comes in from someone who isn't in FYI yet, the form is unaffected and the response is saved in Socket as normal, it simply isn't filed. So it works best on onboarding and annual forms you send to clients you already act for, rather than on a public enquiry form.

See our FYI guide for connecting FYI to Socket.