QA/QC workflows for Survey123 (Inbox Setup)

[spatialdude2025]

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some advice (and hopefully real-world examples) on how people are handling QA/QC with Survey123.

We’ve got a few field teams out collecting data and servicing assets. Before anything gets finalized or printed, someone in the office needs to review what’s been captured — fixing typos, filling in anything that was missed, or sometimes rejecting it and sending it back to the field to be redone.

At the moment, we’re using the Inbox (configured like this: https://support.esri.com/en-us/knowledge-base/how-to-populate-a-related-table-from-an-arcgis-survey1...)  with a defined dataset (around 7,000 features), but honestly… it’s been pretty painful. Searching and filtering — especially when related inspections are involved — is really slow from the Surve123 WEB app, so they complain.

The main challenge is that the people doing the QA aren’t GIS users, so whatever we build needs to be super simple and easy to follow.

I’ve been thinking about trying something in Experience Builder or maybe Dashboards, but I’m not sure if that’s the right direction — especially when it comes to editing + reviewing photos in one place (they will not show in the correct question).

Just wondering how others are approaching this:

• What does your QA/QC workflow look like?
• Are you using Survey123 alone, or combining it with other apps?
• Has anyone built a simple review interface for non-GIS users?

Would love to hear what’s worked (or hasn’t). Even rough ideas or screenshots would be super helpful. Thanks in advance!

[MobiusSnake]

I'll often use a dashboard with an embedded survey.  When a record is selected in the dashboard, the Global ID is used to populate the S123 form with the same record for editing.

If the questions are simple enough, I may skip the embedded S123 form and use a dashboard table with editing enabled.  When you get repeats in the mix this can get a little trickier but it's still possible.

In a handful of cases where multiple layers are involved and the spatial relationships between the layers are key (more geometry editing). I've set up a map for use with the Web Editor, with attribute editing configured using smart forms in the map.

Although it depends on the role of the reviewer, which varies between organizations - usually by the size of the organization - I typically have my review process linked to a view of the hosted feature layer rather than directly to the hosted feature layer.  It usually makes sense to block adds, it sometimes makes sense to block deletes, and occasionally it makes sense to block geometry editing.  If you have fields automatically populated by a webhook or notebook after survey submission, it may make sense to disable editing or hide those as well.

[Neal_t_k]

I second everything @MobiusSnake said.   

As far as non-GIS users.  You can make dashboards/ExB to look similar to spreadsheets they may be used to reviewing in, table based.   And viewer and editor licenses are cheaper than Editor/field app bundle licenses which are needed to submit S123 forms through the app.  Without some form of license, you are limited to exporting the data through power automate/python and read only review.

QAQC workflow: I use a combination of flags in the data, powerautomate, and python to trigger automated notification emails to go to a dashboard to review.