Overview

When *your* organisation is the one being asked to complete a security questionnaire, 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 guide covers the ZIN Advisor section, reached from the sidebar.

> 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 deployed for your environment. The one further down, below Master Data, opens the section described in this article. If you only see one of them, it is the section described here.

Prerequisites

• Permission to view ZIN (zin:view) — without it the whole section is blocked
• Permission to add (zin:add, or questionnaire:add for questionnaires) to upload files, generate answers, approve or export
• A questionnaire file to work from
• A knowledge base with your organisation's standard answers — strongly recommended, as the quality of the drafts depends on it

The Three Tabs

Navigation: Sidebar → ZIN Advisor

The page is headed ZIN Advisor and has three tabs:

The Checklist tab opens by default.

Building Your Knowledge Base

Navigation: Sidebar → ZIN Advisor → Knowledge Base

The knowledge base is a table of question-and-answer pairs:

Each row has Edit and Delete actions.

Adding an entry by hand

1. Click Add.
2. Fill in the Question — the wording that will be used for knowledge base lookups.
3. Fill in the Answer — this is what ZIN Advisor uses to generate responses.
4. Optionally add Tags, for example policy, encryption, incident.
5. Save.

Importing entries in bulk

1. Click Import.
2. Upload an .xlsx, .csv, .docx or .pdf file containing question-answer pairs.

For spreadsheets, label the columns Question, Answer and, optionally, Tags. A Download Template option gives you a correctly shaped file to start from.

> Keep the knowledge base current. The AI will faithfully reuse an outdated answer if that is what it finds.

A card on this tab also points to the Vendor Pulse Chrome extension, which uses the same knowledge base to help fill questionnaires hosted on other websites. See the separate Chrome extension article for that.

Answering a Questionnaire With AI

Navigation: Sidebar → ZIN Advisor → Questionnaire

Step 1: Upload the questionnaire

1. Click Upload Questionnaire.
2. Give it a name — for example Security Questionnaire Q1 2026.
3. Upload the file. Accepted types are .xlsx, .xls, .csv, .pdf and .docx.

The dialog shows the processing progress and reports Processing Complete or Processing Failed. On success you are taken straight to the review screen.

Step 2: Check the list

The Questionnaire tab lists everything you have uploaded:

Click a row, or use the row menu → Review, to open it. The row menu also offers Delete.

Step 3: Generate the answers

In the review screen, click Generate Answers. The button shows progress as it works — Generating 12/80… — and reports Answer generation complete! when it finishes.

ZIN works question by question. It first looks for a match in your knowledge base; if it finds a strong one it reuses that answer, and if it does not, it drafts one and marks it with lower confidence.

Step 4: Review each answer

The review table has these columns:

Confidence is colour-coded so you can triage at a glance: green from 80% upwards, amber from 50% to 79%, red below 50%.

Work through the list:

• High confidence, green — read and accept.
• Amber or red — read carefully. Click the answer to edit it; the status changes to Edited once you save.
• No Match — ZIN found nothing to work from. Write the answer yourself, and consider adding it to the knowledge base so next time it is matched.

The row menu offers Retry if you want ZIN to have another go at a single answer.

Step 5: Approve and export

• Approve All marks the answers as approved. If everything is already approved you are told so rather than nothing happening.
• Export XLSX downloads the completed questionnaire as a spreadsheet.

The questionnaire's status moves to Reviewed and then Exported as you go.

Generating a Checklist From a Regulation

Navigation: Sidebar → ZIN Advisor → Checklist

The Checklist tab does the reverse job: you upload a guideline, regulation or mandate document and ZIN produces a checklist of questions from it, which you can then use in your own assessments.

1. Click Upload File and choose the document.
2. Wait while ZIN generates the checklist.
3. The Uploaded Documents table lists what you have uploaded, with the number of Questions generated, Uploaded Date, Uploaded By, Last Updated and Updated By.
4. Click a row to open the generated questions.
5. Select the questions you want and use Assign Template to place them into a template and category.

Troubleshooting

The ZIN Advisor section shows a "not authorised" screen → The section requires zin:view or zin:add. Ask your administrator to grant one of them.

Upload Questionnaire, Add, Import or Generate Answers are missing → Those actions need an add permission (zin:add, or questionnaire:add for questionnaires). Viewing alone is not enough.

The questionnaire status is stuck on Failed → The file could not be parsed. Confirm it is one of the accepted types, that the questions are in readable text rather than images, and re-upload.

Most answers come back red or marked No Match → Your knowledge base has little to match against. Add the answers you write manually back into the knowledge base — coverage improves quickly.

An answer is wrong even though confidence is high → A high-confidence match means ZIN found a close question in your knowledge base, not that the stored answer is still correct. Fix the entry on the Knowledge Base tab so it is not reused.

My import file was rejected → For spreadsheets and CSVs, the columns must be labelled Question, Answer and optionally Tags. Use Download Template to get a file in the right shape.

I edited an answer but the export still shows the old text → Make sure the edit was saved — the row's status should read Edited — then export again.

Need more help? Contact support@zeron.one