Recurring Questionnaires
Some questions are only useful asked repeatedly. A sleep score on its own tells you almost nothing; the same score every week for two months tells you whether what you changed worked. Recurring questionnaires exist for that: you set a questionnaire to repeat, the client answers it on schedule, and the answers become a line on a chart rather than a pile of forms.
They are built from the same form builder as your intake forms, so anything you can ask on intake you can ask on a schedule.
Scoring
A question scores when you give its options point values. Each option carries a number alongside its label — "Never" might be 0 and "Every night" 3 — and the questionnaire's score is the sum of what the client picked, out of the maximum they could have scored.
This is what makes a standard instrument work. If your practice uses a validated questionnaire with a published scoring key, enter that key as the option values and the total Ready Practice records is the instrument's own score, comparable to its published thresholds.
A few details worth knowing:
A question the client skipped scores zero, but still counts toward the maximum. A half-finished questionnaire therefore reads as a low score, not a high one — deliberately, so an incomplete submission can never look like an improvement.
Only questions you gave point values to are scored. You can mix scored and unscored questions freely — the free-text "anything else we should know?" at the end doesn't disturb the number.
A questionnaire with no scored questions simply has no score, and shows as a set of answers instead. That's a valid way to use it.
Setting the schedule
A recurring questionnaire repeats daily, weekly, every two weeks, or monthly. Ready Practice checks once a day and issues the next one when the interval has passed since the last.
If the client hasn't completed the previous questionnaire, the next one is not issued. Someone who falls a month behind on a weekly questionnaire comes back to one form, not four. This is deliberate — a stack of identical forms is the fastest way to make a client stop answering entirely.
The practical consequence is that the interval sets the earliest the next one can arrive, not a guaranteed cadence. A client who answers late shifts their own schedule later.
What the client sees
Clients see their questionnaire history in the portal, grouped by questionnaire and newest first, with each submission expandable to the answers they gave. Where a score exists it shows on the submission.
This matters more than it sounds. A client who can see their own score move is a client who has a reason to fill the next one in.
What you see
Each questionnaire builds a trend on the client's record — every completed submission appends to it, so you get the series rather than only the latest number. That series is what you look at in a review: not "their score is 14" but "their score was 22 eight weeks ago".
Next steps
To build your first one, start from Intake Forms — the builder is the same, and the only addition is point values on the options and a repeat interval.
To attach one to a course of care, see Clinical Protocols. A questionnaire scheduled alongside a protocol is how you measure whether the protocol is doing anything.