Help with survey format to create online versions of forms (budget requests, graduation apps, etc.)

Hi Mockingjay -- this is a good use case. We use Qualtrics for forms for requests for information (RFIs), which are a tool for gathering responses to questions about products and services from the public. They are generally text-based but the same principle would apply for a form collecting information like what you are looking to do for budgets.
In terms of integrating or embedding other data, there are a number of ways to do this:

1. You can integrate your Qualtrics survey platform to pull data from another database. This would require some coding on your end, which is probably best to ask your Qualtrics account rep about; they can arrange for your developers to work with Qualtrics's engineering team to set it up.


2. You can also integrate data on the back end, using Tableau and Tableau Prep, for example, or another database or data lake tool like Google BigQuery. You can then analyze those data in your tool of choice.


3. If you're looking to integrate session data (like landing page, etc.) that is generated by the user cookie (assuming those are enabled), you can set those up as embedded data in the survey flow.

I work for a School at a University, and we've developed a Budget Request process using Qualtrics. Ultimately, the administrative employee processing the requests on the back end doesn't need access to the entire database of response data; they typically just need the individual response data as it is submitted, so we utilize the email trigger process through Workflow. The decision maker (Dean) receives the requests, and if approved, the admin does the ordering or otherwise authorizes the expense based on info in an email triggered from the survey response. We've even recently built this process out to include an option for the decision maker to forward the request on to a Budget Advisory Team, and each member of that team reviews the request, rates it using a rubric, and makes a recommendation on approval which then goes back to the Dean. This is all done through Qualtrics using Workflow email triggers and multiple surveys that pass data using a contact list (with data initiated by a contact list trigger from the initial request and built upon from data in the subsequent surveys). This process may not work for your organization, but if you're interested in learning any more, I'm happy to share. It's not perfect and there is some manual process involved, but it has worked for us so far. Plus, we have the data compiled all in one place in the event that we want to do some deeper analysis or if we need to compile components of the data for a report down the road.