Currently, you can enable the 'Decision Auto-Waive' for the Decision Checklist Step Type. This waives any step that came before, which helps with reporting on Statuses.
Please add a similar option to the Application Checklist Step Type, so we don't have to manually waive the Inquiry (Initial Contact) Step if a candidate did not inquire/ went straight to applying.
The 'technical' alternative of creating more than one checklist to accommodate this creates too much confusion.
This is critical for larger schools that need to print lists of inquiries for promotion efforts for leads vs. real applicants who need a completely different type of follow-up. When real applicants continue to show as "inquiries" this causes customer service to drop. It also impacts the accuracy of data reports. About half of our applicants start with an online inquiry. Many go straight to applying via the website because they already know our school and are ready, or they have had their questions answered by the phone. They don't need to submit an online inquiry. An inquiry is an optional step at every school for the purpose of "sales" and the checklists should be able to recognize that an applicant is an applicant immediately upon the application submittal. Requiring that a team member go back and waive the inquiry in order for an application to have a status of "applicant" is not efficient nor is it accurate. It also keeps the system from updating in real time. If we get 50 applications over the weekend, our application report should include those applicants if printing an "applicant list" on Monday morning. Instead, they would literally shop as inquiries based on the way the checklists work now and we would have to go back to all 50 profiles and manually waive the inquiry. Thank you for putting this at the top of the development list of "to dos'. You will make every admissions office in the country do a happy dance if you find a way to resolve this.