up front

[unpakwon]

Does "up front" in the following mean "in advance"?

Another problem element was that individual agency applications usually covered all possible use cases, so the form took a long time for any single business to fill out, even if the answer to most questions was "Not applicable." For this, Kelly used the precedent of Turbo Tax, which asks questions up front so you only have to see those portions of the form relevant to you, in order to make the NYC Business Express Common Intake application more user friendly.

Thank you.

 

[irishosaru]

From reading that sentence, I would say that 'up front' has a similar meaning to 'at the beginning'. I think that 'in advance' suggests that there is some gap in time between the initial questions and the rest of the form to be filled in, but it seems like in this case, immediately after the questions are asked, the perosn fills in the rest of the form.

 

[SoothingDave]

It is in advance of filling in the forms. This is talking about a software wizard that queries you and then helps you fill in the forms.