Build the form

Design forms in a drag-and-drop builder — no separate developer or XLSForm expertise required to get started. Question types cover the field: short text, numbers, single and multi-select, dates, GPS capture, photo and file upload, and signature.

Add conditional logic to show or hide questions based on earlier answers, and it’s enforced both on the device and on the server — a skipped question can’t be forced through by editing the request. Already have forms built elsewhere? Import an XLSForm from ODK or KoboToolbox and Monival rebuilds your questions and choice lists — the page linked above is exact about what comes across and what you’ll rebuild.

Collect in the field

The Monival Data Collect mobile app, for Android and iOS, is offline-first: an enumerator with no signal all day loses nothing. Submissions, GPS coordinates, and media are captured and queued on the device, then synced automatically once a connection is available.

Geofencing warns an enumerator on their device if they’re collecting outside a project’s defined boundary — the submission still goes through, flagged, so out-of-area records are easy to spot during review rather than silently blocked in the field.

Kiosk mode locks a tablet to a single form for community intake desks and surveys — offline-capable, resetting to a blank submission after each response, with no separate device-management software to install.

Sync without losing data — or duplicating it

Two failure modes matter more than any other in offline collection: a submission that never arrives, and a submission that arrives twice. Monival’s mobile app queues locally with a background sync worker, exponential backoff, and a bounded retry count. Every submission gets a client-generated ID enforced unique at the database level, scoped to your organisation, so retried or duplicated sync attempts don’t create duplicate records.

Version conflicts are handled the same deliberate way: if a device submits against a form version older than the one currently published, that submission is marked as conflicted and held in a review queue — a person decides what happens to it, instead of the discrepancy passing through unnoticed. Read the full breakdown of how this works, including the failure modes it’s designed against.

See it the moment it syncs

Submissions land on a live dashboard as they arrive — filter by enumerator, date, or location, and spot data-quality issues before your team leaves the field rather than after a report is due. Need the numbers somewhere else? A live OData feed plugs straight into Power BI, and webhooks push every submission event to your own pipeline in real time, alongside a full REST API and CSV/XLSX export.

What this looks like end to end

A field programme typically runs: design the form → publish it → enumerators collect offline → submissions sync and appear on a live dashboard as they arrive. See the complete guide to offline data collection for the full workflow, from form design through to sync strategy.