While your report's PDF is generating
Publishing an inspection report finishes right away, and its PDF is generated straight after. On a long report — hundreds of assets, lots of photos — that PDF takes a little while, so Essential shows you a Generating PDF window while it works.
The report itself is already published at that point. Its deficiencies, service completions, and timeline entry are all recorded, and nothing about them depends on the PDF.
The same Generating PDF window appears when you click Download PDF on a draft report, since a draft PDF is also generated fresh from the report's saved content.
What you can do while it generates
Close the window and keep working. Closing it does not cancel anything. The PDF keeps generating and lands on the report on its own.
Leave the page. The report is published, so you can move on to the next job.
Come back to it. If you reload the report while its PDF is still generating, the progress window reappears and picks up where it left off.
When the PDF is ready you get a notification in the bell menu at the top of the screen, and the report page shows the finished PDF. If you left the progress window open, it switches to PDF ready with a View PDF button.
Where to find it: On the open report, right after you click Publish, or after Download PDF on a draft
Draft downloads
A draft's Download PDF uses the same progress window: you can close it and keep editing while the PDF generates, and it offers View PDF when done. Like publishing, you get a Draft PDF ready bell notification when a longer render finishes — so you can move on to other work and come back to it. One difference from publishing:
A draft PDF is a one-off download for you. It is not attached to the report or the job, and your customers can never see it.
While the draft hasn't changed, clicking Download PDF again re-opens the PDF you already generated instead of generating another one. Any edit to the report makes the next download generate a fresh PDF.
If the PDF doesn't generate
Occasionally a PDF fails to generate. When that happens you see PDF didn't generate, with a short reason.
Your report is still published — only the PDF is missing, so there is nothing to redo. Click Retry to generate it again. You can also close the window and use Download PDF on the report at any time, which generates a fresh PDF on the spot. On a draft, Retry simply runs the download again.
Publishing and emailing at the same time
When you publish with Publish and send and pick recipients, Essential waits for the PDF before sending, so the email always has the finished report attached. You won't see the progress window on that path.
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