Help & Guidance

No. There is no limit per organisation and we do not expect to need one.

A saved assessment is a small amount of text, so even an organisation with several thousand of them takes up very little space.

Documents you upload are never stored. When you upload a job description the file is read, the text is taken from it, and the file itself is discarded. Only the text is saved with the assessment.

Indefinitely. Nothing expires and nothing is deleted automatically.

An assessment stays until somebody in your organisation deletes it. Because nothing is deleted on a timer, there is no warning before deletion and no risk of losing an assessment you still need.

This is deliberate. An assessment is the evidence behind a compliance decision, so we would rather you kept it for as long as you judge necessary and removed it on your own terms.

HQN creates your organisation and nominates your first administrator. Nobody can register themselves, so an organisation cannot appear without HQN setting it up.

After that your administrator manages your own people. They enter a colleague's email address and choose what that person should be able to do, and the colleague receives an invitation to set up their own login. You do not need to come back to HQN to add or remove someone.

There are five levels of access: viewer, assessor, moderator, organisation administrator, and platform administrator, which is an HQN role.

No. You can only see assessments belonging to your own organisation. There is no shared or pooled view, and one organisation cannot read, edit or export another's records.

This is enforced by the database itself, not only by the application. Every assessment is tagged with the organisation it belongs to, and the database will only return rows belonging to the organisation making the request. The tool connects using a restricted account that cannot override that rule.

The practical effect is that a mistake in our software cannot expose one organisation's data to another, because the database would refuse the query.

Yes. An HQN platform administrator can switch into your organisation and see your saved assessments as you see them. This is how HQN provides support and oversight.

The role is held by a small number of named people at HQN, and their access is recorded. Opening an assessment writes a viewed entry to its history alongside the changes, so you can see who has looked at a record and when, not just who edited it.

If you need that history for your own governance, ask your HQN contact.

Yes to both. Any assessment can be downloaded as a Word document, a PDF or a spreadsheet, and any assessment can be deleted by your organisation.

Your administrator can also export everything your organisation holds in one go, either as a simple CSV register or as an Excel workbook containing every field and the full history. Both are on the Assessments page: "Export CSV" for the register and "Export full record (SAR)" for the Excel workbook, which is the one to use if a member of staff makes a subject access request. It covers all staff, so share only the rows about the person who asked.

So you can take your records with you and remove them from the tool.

Sign-in is by email address and password. Access is invite-only, so an account exists only because somebody in your organisation created it.

You are signed out automatically after four hours of inactivity, and after 24 hours in all cases.

What each person can do follows their access level: a viewer can read assessments, an assessor can create and edit them, a moderator can review them, and an organisation administrator can also manage your users. So you can give a colleague read-only access without letting them change anything.

Only what your people choose to enter. The tool stores the role title, the job description text, and optionally a postholder name.

The postholder name is deliberately optional. If you would rather not hold names here, use an employee number or reference instead, and the assessment works in exactly the same way.

One thing worth telling your assessors: job descriptions sometimes name the current postholder in the body text. If you do not want that name stored, remove it before pasting the description in.

Where it is held: the tool runs on our own servers within the EU, and backups are held separately in the United Kingdom. Nothing is stored outside the UK or the EU, so no international transfer arrangements are needed. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest on disk, and backups are taken nightly.