Getting Started with Checklists

📚 Part of the series Application Building Phase III: Checklists, Automations, and the Status Page

Checklists are a visual indicator of required items for any given Application. These items can be viewed both internally (by institutional staff) and externally (by an applicant).

Checklists display three main data points:

• The checklist item name (“Details”)

• Its current status (“Status”)

• The date the checklist item was marked completed (“Date”)

Planning a checklist

Make an inventory of the items that you want to track on your checklist. Your inventory should include:

• Checklist items: Application requirements.

• Materials: The documents, test scores, or forms that an applicant submits to fulfill an application requirement.

• Groups: Sets of common application requirements for different types of applicants. For example: first-year or transfer students.

• Sections: Optional organizational distinctions for different types of application requirements. For example, admissions checklist, financial aid checklist, matriculation checklist.

After your checklist has been planned, you can begin the work of building your checklist and materials in Slate.

Checklists and materials

Materials are used in the Material Fulfillments settings for checklist items. If you haven’t created materials yet, check out our Materials Overview back in Phase I: Core Components.

📖 Checklists and materials

💡 Tip

Slate.org can be used to share information regarding applicant data, such as Checklist items, between undergraduate admission offices and high school counselors, independent counselors, and community-based organizations. See Slate.org Application Sharing Settings for more information.

Checklist item statuses

Checklist items have three public-facing statuses, which are visible both internally and externally:

• Received: Appears as Received with a green check mark ✅ and the date that the checklist item was fulfilled.

• Awaiting, items appears as Awaiting with a red X ❌.

• Waived, which appear as Waived with a grey check mark ✔️ and the date that the item was waived.

Two additional statuses are available, which are only visible internally:

• Received Copy, which appears identically to Received. Applicants will see the Received Copy as Received.

• Hide, or Hidden which causes the checklist item row to become gray and marks the date that the checklist item was hidden. Hidden items will not be displayed to applicants.

Custom checklist statuses

In addition to the standard checklist item statuses, custom statuses can be added to some material types. This is for advanced use-cases only, and is not recommended for most institutions.

📖 Custom Checklist Statuses

Assigning items to a checklist

By default, the only items that are added to an applicant’s checklist are references and school reports, assuming you’ve enabled those parts of the Slate-hosted application. Some items, like test scores, can also be configured to appear on the checklist based on their own configurations.

For all other items, rules must be configured to specify when they are added to a checklist. Checklist items can either be added as part of a group of items, or individually. See Auto-Generated Checklist Items & System Materials for more information about these items.

📖 Assigning Checklist Items

📝 Has your institution been using Slate since before 2019?

You may also have transcripts automatically added to your checklist. For more information, see this article.

Checklist fulfillment and the Received status

To determine whether or not a checklist item is received, Slate checks for the existence of objects you’ve configured to fulfill that item’s requirement. These objects are aptly named fulfillments.

Fulfillments can be materials, test scores, or forms. It’s also possible to use rules to mark an item as “Received” using custom criteria, or to mark an item as “Received” administratively on an ad-hoc basis.

📖 See Checklist Item Settings for more information about configuring checklists and fulfillments.

Querying on checklists

The relationship of Application to Checklist is one to many. A single applicant may have multiple checklist items. When querying for Checklist, making a join at the base of the query to Checklists will flatten that join to one to one and return results for only 1 checklist item. Making a Subquery Filter or Export with a join to Checklists will allow Slate to search through all checklist items associated with an application.

Troubleshooting checklists

Running into unexpected behavior with checklists? See Troubleshooting Checklists.

If you’re still stuck, consider reaching out to other Slate users in the Community Forums.