FAQ: Assessments

Audience: prospects evaluating Relyance, and new customers getting started.

#What is Relyance Assessments, in one paragraph?

It's the structured-questionnaire engine built into the Relyance AI platform - the same system whether you're running a Data Protection Impact Assessment, a vendor/third-party risk assessment, an assessment against an AI model or use case, or a fully custom compliance questionnaire. You design a template of sections and questions once, then create as many assessments from it as you need, with every change tracked in an audit log.

#What kinds of assessments can I build?

Anything you can express as sections and questions: DPIAs/PIAs, vendor or third-party risk assessments, assessments scoped to a specific AI model, assessments run against a cataloged AI use case, application security reviews, or a fully custom questionnaire for any other workflow.

#Is this only for privacy teams, or can security and AI governance use it too?

It's a shared engine, not a privacy-only tool. A security team can use it for AppSec and vendor security reviews - for example, triggering a scoped assessment as part of vendor intake via the Assessment Workflow API, before a contract is signed. An AI governance team can use it to assess an AI model or a cataloged AI use case against a standard risk template before it goes live, and export a compliance package once the review is complete. Privacy teams use the same underlying templates, entity mapping, and audit log for DPIAs and ROPA-linked assessments.

#Do I have to build every assessment by hand?

No. Beyond creating one manually from the template library, you can create an assessment directly from a ROPA/processing-activity record, against an AI model, against a cataloged AI use case, or trigger one programmatically through the Assessment Workflow API - for example, a single call that creates a vendor, creates an assessment against it, and shares it with stakeholders. See the Technical Implementation Guide. Once an assessment exists, you don't have to answer it by hand either - the AI Assistant can answer many question types directly, and Attestations can pre-fill others from what Relyance already knows about the entity.

#Can external vendors or stakeholders fill these out?

Yes - assessments can be shared with internal owners and invited external stakeholders. Access to a given assessment can also be restricted to specific email addresses, and reviewers can comment on individual questions to raise and resolve issues inline.

#Is there an audit trail I can hand to an auditor?

Yes. The Assessment Audit Log captures every question, answer, and structural change with the responsible user, a timestamp, and before/after values for edits, and it exports as a single formatted PDF or as CSV for import into a GRC tool. See Assessment Audit Log and Reporting.

#What happens if the underlying data changes after an assessment is marked complete?

Where Attestations are enabled on your account, the assessment flips to a Needs Review status, with a delta list showing exactly what changed per field - old value, new value, source, and timestamp - so a completed DPIA or vendor assessment doesn't quietly go stale the moment the processing activity or vendor relationship it covered changes. Base assessment notifications are available to all customers; the Needs Review mechanics are part of Attestations.

#Can Relyance auto-fill assessment answers for me, and what's an "Attestation"?

Where enabled, yes. Attestations is the name for this two-way connection between an assessment and the entity it's run against: assessments pre-fill from what Relyance already knows about the vendor, product, processing activity, AI model, or similar, and completed answers push back to that record (with a before/after preview before anything writes). Every entity page gets an Attestations tab, kept structurally separate from its Findings tab - Findings is what Relyance observed via scan or integration, Attestations is what a human told it via an assessment or contract.

#Can I generate a template automatically from a document instead of building it from scratch?

Yes - from the template list, click Upload, name the assessment, choose its type, and select a file (PDF, DOC, and similar), and Relyance generates the template's questions from it instead of you building them from scratch.

#Can an AI Assistant just answer assessment questions for me?

Yes - the AI Assistant can answer matrix, multiple-answer, toggle, personal-data-type, and vendor questions directly inside an assessment. Its answers are flagged in the UI so you always know what it filled in, and an agent drawer on the assessment page lets you follow its reasoning as it works and ask it to find relevant assessments or templates. This is a different mechanism from Attestations above - the AI Assistant reasons over a question rather than only mapping it to a known field.

#Is there a dashboard for tracking assessment status and SLAs?

Yes - a dedicated Assessments dashboard shows SLA settings and status history across your assessments, and every figure on it opens the underlying records it counts.

#Is there an API?

Yes. The Assessment Workflow API triggers and polls automated creation/sharing workflows and is also reachable as an MCP tool, and the Assessment Population API handles field mapping, pre-filling, and pushing answers back to source records for Attestations. The full reference lives at docs.relyance.ai/docs/api-reference, under the Privacy Assessments section.

#How does authentication work for the API?

Every request carries an Authorization: Bearer <token> header with an access token issued by the Relyance Identity Service, scoped to a single workspace. See the Technical Implementation Guide.

#Are answer changes tracked even when an external respondent made them?

Yes - all answer submissions and edits are logged in the audit trail regardless of who made them.

#How far back does the audit log go?

From the point the feature was enabled for your account forward. Changes made before enablement aren't retroactively logged.

#Does the HTML source editor let me write arbitrary HTML anywhere in an assessment?

No - it's scoped specifically to question and section description fields in assessment templates, and content is sanitized when you switch back to the visual editor. It isn't available on question titles, answer fields, comments, or any other editor in the platform.