Overview

When your organisation is the one being asked to complete a security questionnaire — by a customer, a partner or a regulator — Vendor Pulse can draft the answers for you. You upload the questionnaire, ZIN matches each question against your Knowledge Base, drafts an answer where it can, and you review, edit and approve before exporting.

This is a tool for you answering questionnaires you receive. It is not something your vendors use when they answer the assessments you send them, and it does not fill in the vendor portal.

There are two ways to use it:

• ZIN Advisor → Questionnaire tab — for a questionnaire you have as a file. Covered in this article.
• The Chrome extension — for a questionnaire hosted as a web form on someone else's site. See How to Install and Use the Chrome Extension.

There are two sidebar entries labelled ZIN Advisor. The one at the very top of the sidebar opens the ZIN AI chat assistant and only appears when ZIN AI is available for your environment. The one further down, below Master Data, opens the section described in this article.

Prerequisites

• Permission to open ZIN Advisor — zin:view or zin:add. Without one of them the whole section is blocked
• zin:add to upload a questionnaire
• zin:add or questionnaire:add to generate answers, edit, retry, approve, export and delete
• A questionnaire file to work from
• A Knowledge Base with your organisation's standard answers. The drafts are only as good as the Knowledge Base — build it first, as described in How to Use the ZIN Knowledge Base and Checklist

Step 1: Upload the Questionnaire

Navigation: Sidebar → ZIN Advisor → Questionnaire tab

The tab is headed Questionnaire Fill.

1. Click Upload Questionnaire.
2. Drag the questionnaire file onto the upload area, or click it to choose the file. Accepted types are .xlsx, .xls, .csv, .pdf and .docx.
3. Optionally type a name in Name (optional) — for example Security Questionnaire Q1 2026. If you leave it blank, the file name is used.
4. Click Upload & Process.

The dialog changes to Processing Questionnaire… and shows a live log as ZIN works:

• the file being uploaded
• the Knowledge Base being loaded, with the number of entries
• each question being matched
• the result for each question — Matched, Generated or No Match — with its confidence

When it finishes the dialog reads Processing Complete and shows how many questions were matched. You are taken to the review screen automatically after a moment, or you can click View Results. If something goes wrong it reads Processing Failed with the reason, and offers Try Again.

Extraction and answer drafting happen in this one step — by the time you reach the review screen, the first draft of every answer is already there.

How questions are found in your file

The file must contain readable text. Questions inside images or scanned pages cannot be extracted.

Step 2: Find It in the List

The Questionnaire tab lists everything you have uploaded:

A questionnaire stays at Generated while you review, approve and export it — the status does not change when you do.

Click a row, or use the row menu → Review, to open it. The row menu also offers Delete, which removes the questionnaire and its answers immediately, without asking you to confirm.

Step 3: Review Each Answer

Opening a questionnaire takes you to Questionnaire Review. A strip under the title shows Total, Matched and Approved counts.

Answer statuses

Confidence colours

After matching or drafting, ZIN checks each answer against the question and lowers the confidence if it spots a problem, so the figure shown can be below the match score. A generated answer is capped at 65%, so green only ever appears on answers reused from your Knowledge Base, and amber or red means "check this one".

Editing an answer

1. Click the answer text. It turns into a text box.
2. Change the text.
3. Click anywhere outside the box. The answer is saved and its status changes to Edited. Press Esc instead to abandon the change.

Retrying a single answer

Click the Retry icon at the end of a row to have ZIN match and draft that one answer again. Use it after you have added or corrected the relevant Knowledge Base entry.

Step 4: Regenerate, Approve and Export

The buttons at the top of the review screen:

Things to know before you rely on them:

• Approve All works one page at a time. The table shows 10 answers per page by default. Either raise the rows per page, or go through each page and click Approve All on each.
• There is no approve button for a single answer.
• Generate Answers redrafts the whole questionnaire. Use Retry when you only want one answer redone.
• Export XLSX does not require the answers to be approved. It exports whatever is there, so finish your review first.

The exported workbook has one sheet, Questionnaire Answers, with the question number, Section, Question, Answer, Confidence and Status for every question. It is a new workbook — your answers are not written back into the layout of the file you uploaded, so copy them across if the requester needs their own format returned.

Good Practice

• Always read every answer before it leaves your organisation. These are drafts, not approved statements.
• A high-confidence match means ZIN found a close question, not that the stored answer is still true. If the Knowledge Base answer is out of date, it will be reused faithfully.
• Feed the Knowledge Base. When you write an answer yourself because ZIN had nothing to match, add that question and answer to the Knowledge Base afterwards so the next questionnaire is faster.

Troubleshooting

The ZIN Advisor section shows an "Unauthorized" screen → The section requires zin:view or zin:add. Ask your administrator to grant one of them.

Upload Questionnaire, Generate Answers, Approve All and Export XLSX are missing → Those actions need zin:add or questionnaire:add. Viewing alone is not enough.

I can see Upload Questionnaire but the upload is refused → Uploading specifically needs zin:add. questionnaire:add on its own shows the button but does not allow the upload.

"Unsupported file type" → Use XLSX, CSV, PDF or DOCX.

"Uploaded file is empty." or "No questions found in file" → The file has no readable content, or ZIN could not identify any questions in it. Check the questions are text rather than images, and that a spreadsheet has its questions in one column.

The questionnaire status is Failed → The file could not be processed. Fix the file and upload it again; delete the failed entry from the row menu.

Most answers come back red or marked No Match → Your Knowledge Base has little to match against. Add entries for those topics, then click Generate Answers again.

An answer is wrong even though confidence is high → Fix the entry on the Knowledge Base tab so it is not reused, then use Retry on that row.

I clicked Approve All but some answers are still not approved → Approve All only covers the page you are on. Move to the next page and click it again.

The Approved count looks too low → The count reflects the answers approved by your most recent Approve All, not a running total. Check the Status column on each page instead.

I edited an answer but the export still shows the old text → The edit is saved when you click outside the text box. Make sure the row's status reads Edited, then export again.

"Failed to generate answers." or "Failed to export questionnaire." → Try again. If it keeps failing, contact support with the questionnaire name.

I deleted a questionnaire by mistake → Delete acts immediately. Upload the file again.

Need more help? Contact support@zeron.one