Overview

ZIN Advisor is the side of Vendor Pulse that helps you *answer* questionnaires rather than send them. It has three tabs, and they do three different jobs:

• Knowledge Base — your library of reusable question-and-answer pairs. This is the reference material everything else draws on.
• Questionnaire — upload a questionnaire someone has sent you and have ZIN draft the answers from your Knowledge Base.
• Checklist — upload guidelines, regulations or mandates and get back a custom checklist of questions you can reuse as assessment content.

This guide covers all three, plus the Chrome extension that carries your Knowledge Base to questionnaires hosted on other people's sites.

Prerequisites

• Access to ZIN Advisor (zin:view)
• ZIN Add (zin:add) or Questionnaire Add (questionnaire:add) to create or import content
• Your existing security documentation or past questionnaire responses, if you want to bulk import

Finding ZIN Advisor

Navigation: Sidebar → ZIN Advisor

Click ZIN Advisor in the sidebar. The page header reads ZIN Advisor and carries the three tabs — Checklist, Knowledge Base and Questionnaire.

If your sidebar shows two ZIN Advisor entries, the second one is the ZIN AI chat assistant. The one you want here is the entry that opens the three tabs.

Part 1: Build Your Knowledge Base

Navigation: Sidebar → ZIN Advisor → Knowledge Base tab

The Knowledge Base holds question-and-answer pairs that ZIN uses as reference material when it drafts answers. The richer it is, the better the drafts.

Option A: Add entries one at a time

1. Open the Knowledge Base tab.
2. Click Add.
3. The Add Knowledge Base Entry dialog opens. Fill in:

• Question — the security questionnaire question as it would typically be worded, for example "Does your organization have a formal information security policy?"
• Answer — your organisation's standard response. This is what ZIN Advisor uses to generate replies.
• Tags — comma-separated tags that classify the entry, for example policy, encryption, incident. Tags make entries easier to find through search and filtering.

1. Click Add Entry.

> Tip: Start with the questions that appear in nearly every security questionnaire — access control, encryption, incident response, business continuity and data protection.

Option B: Bulk import from a file

This is the faster way to get started if you already have answers written down somewhere.

1. On the Knowledge Base tab, click Import.
2. The Import Knowledge Base dialog opens.
3. Click Download Template to get the spreadsheet template (VendorPulse_KB_Template.xlsx).
4. Fill it in, one row per question-and-answer pair.
5. Upload the completed file. Supported file types are .xlsx, .csv, .docx and .pdf.
6. Click Import Files.

For XLSX and CSV files, make sure the columns are labelled Question, Answer and — optionally — Tags.

Managing your entries

The Knowledge Base table shows:

From the ⋮ menu on any row you can Edit an entry (the dialog becomes Edit Knowledge Base Entry, and the button becomes Save Changes) or Delete one that is out of date. You can also search the table by keyword.

The page carries a banner for the Vendor Pulse · AI Questionnaire Assistant Chrome extension, with an Add to Chrome link that takes you to the Chrome Web Store listing.

Part 2: Answer a Questionnaire with ZIN

Navigation: Sidebar → ZIN Advisor → Questionnaire tab

This is where you hand ZIN a questionnaire and let it draft the answers. The page is titled Questionnaire Fill.

Upload the questionnaire

1. Open the Questionnaire tab.
2. Click Upload Questionnaire.
3. Select or drag in your questionnaire file. XLSX, CSV, PDF and DOCX are accepted.
4. Optionally give it a name in the Name (optional) field.
5. Click Upload & Process.

The questions are extracted from the file and matched against your Knowledge Base. You can watch this happen in the dialog as it runs.

Track it in the list

The uploaded questionnaire appears in the table with these columns: File, Status, Questions, Matched, Approved and Uploaded.

The Status column moves through:

From the ⋮ menu on a row you can open Review, or Delete the questionnaire.

Part 3: Review and Approve the Answers

Open a questionnaire with Review to reach the Questionnaire Review page.

The table shows, for each question: Question, Section, Answer, Confidence and Status.

Each answer carries one of these statuses:

• Matched — answered directly from a Knowledge Base entry
• Generated — drafted by ZIN
• Edited — you have changed the answer
• Approved — you have signed the answer off
• No Match — ZIN found nothing suitable, so you need to write this one yourself

What you can do here

• Generate Answers — draft answers for the questionnaire. This appears once the questionnaire has been parsed, and shows its progress as it works.
• Click an answer to edit it — edit inline, then save. The answer's status changes to Edited.
• Retry on a row — have ZIN draft that single answer again.
• Approve All — approve every answer that is not already approved.
• Export XLSX — download the completed questionnaire as a spreadsheet.

While answers are being generated, an AI Activity panel opens on the right and shows what ZIN is doing question by question — which ones it matched, which it generated, and which it could not place.

> Tip: When you write an answer yourself because ZIN could not match it, add that question and answer to your Knowledge Base afterwards. Every questionnaire you answer makes the next one faster.

Part 4: Generate a Checklist from Guidelines

Navigation: Sidebar → ZIN Advisor → Checklist tab

The Checklist tab does something different from the Questionnaire tab: you give it a guideline, regulation or mandate, and it gives you back a checklist of questions drawn from that document. This is how you turn a standard you have to comply with into assessment content.

1. Open the Checklist tab.
2. Click Upload File.
3. Select your document. PDF files are accepted here.
4. Click Upload.

Generating the checklist takes a little while — the dialog tells you ZIN is working on it.

Uploaded documents are listed under Uploaded Documents with these columns: Name, Questions, Uploaded Date, Uploaded By, Last Updated and Updated By.

From the ⋮ menu on a row you can View the generated questions, or Delete the document. Deleting requires the ZIN Delete permission (zin:delete).

Reusing the generated questions

Open a document with View to see the questions it produced. Select the ones you want and use Assign Template to add them to an assessment template and category, which makes them available as assessment content.

Part 5: The Chrome Extension

For questionnaires hosted on someone else's site, install the Vendor Pulse · AI Questionnaire Assistant extension from the Chrome Web Store. The Add to Chrome link on the Knowledge Base page takes you straight to the listing.

The extension auto-fills security questionnaires using your Knowledge Base, so the answers you have already curated in Vendor Pulse are available on external forms too.

The Cycle

` Build your Knowledge Base (add entries or bulk import) ↓ Upload a questionnaire → ZIN drafts answers from the Knowledge Base ↓ Review, edit and approve → export ↓ Add the answers you wrote yourself back to the Knowledge Base ↓ The next questionnaire is faster `

Troubleshooting

Many answers came back as No Match → Your Knowledge Base does not yet cover those topics. Add entries for the missing areas and use Generate Answers again.

A single answer is poor → Use Retry on that row to have ZIN draft it again, or click the answer and edit it directly.

Generate Answers is not showing → It appears once the questionnaire has finished parsing and its status is Parsed. If the status is Parsing, give it a moment; if it is Failed, upload the file again.

The bulk import failed → Check the file type is .xlsx, .csv, .docx or .pdf, and that XLSX and CSV files use columns labelled Question, Answer and optionally Tags.

The downloaded template looks empty → That is expected. It gives you the correct column structure; fill in your own question-and-answer pairs underneath the headers.

I can't add or import Knowledge Base entries → Adding and importing requires ZIN Add (zin:add) or Questionnaire Add (questionnaire:add). Ask your administrator to grant one of them.

I can't delete a checklist document → Deleting requires the ZIN Delete permission (zin:delete).

A questionnaire upload failed → Check the file is XLSX, CSV, PDF or DOCX and is not password-protected, then upload it again.

My PDF wasn't accepted on the Checklist tab → The Checklist tab accepts PDF only. If you have a Word or Excel document, upload it on the Questionnaire tab instead, or convert it to PDF first.

Need more help? Contact support@zeron.one