This guide covers the Audit Tool end to end: finding your way around the dashboard, building the tool you audit against, creating an audit, requesting documents from a delegate, reviewing policies and case files, producing the report, and handing findings to a corrective action plan.

It is written to be followed in order for a first audit, and to be skimmed by section afterwards. The numbered markers in each screenshot match the numbered steps beneath it.

What this guide covers

The Audit Tool dashboard is where you start. It shows how much work is outstanding and who owes it, holds the board of audits in three different views, and collects the communications your delegates have sent. This article covers all three.

Opening the Dashboard

Steps:

Two further controls sit on that row. Audit Trends compares results across audits, and COA Universe opens the universe used for the Annual Cognitive Health Assessment.

The Task Dashboard

The three counters across the top split outstanding work by who owes it. Each shows a total, and beneath it how many of those are overdue.

Steps:

The counters follow whichever view and filters are active. On the full board they cover every audit; switch to My View and they narrow to your own work, so the same three cards answer either question depending on where you are.

Best practice: Read the overdue figure before the total. A high total across a full audit programme is normal; the overdue count is what tells you where to look first, and which of the three groups it sits in tells you whose attention it needs.

The Three Views of the Board

Below the counters is the audit board, and the same audits can be shown three ways. The tabs are Grouped, All Audits and My View.

Grouped collects audits onto boards so related work sits together. Use it to look at one delegate's audits as a set.

All Audits is one sortable table of every audit on the board: name, delegate, function, status, percent done, score, scope, year, assignees, the active task with its due date, and when it was last modified. Use it when you know what you are looking for but not which board it is on.

My View narrows the same audits to the ones assigned to you, with the current step of each audit and its due date. This is where you check your own outstanding work.

Both table views carry the same controls: a search box, sortable columns, and a per-row action button for the audit's active task — Send Notice, Start Policy Review, Start File Review and so on — with its due date beside it. You can start the next step on an audit from the board without opening it.

Please note: Filter narrows either table view, but filters are not saved between sessions. If you only want your own audits, My View does that without setting a filter each time.

The Delegate Communication Inbox

The inbox icon carries a badge showing how many communications are unread. Opening it lists what your delegates have sent — each entry naming the collection and the audit it belongs to, who sent it and when.

Steps:

Acknowledging is recorded against the entry, and an entry a colleague has already acknowledged says so, so two people do not chase the same submission.

An audit tool template is the instrument you audit against: a set of elements, each holding the individual factors a delegate is assessed on. You build a template once and create audits from it. This article covers building one from Readily's requirement library and copying one forward from a previous year.

Open the Template Library

Steps:

Templates carry metadata — year, delegated function, line of business and scope. That metadata is what lets Readily suggest the right template when you create an audit, so fill it in even though it is optional.

Open the Template

Inside a template, requirements are grouped into elements. Each row beneath an element is a factor: one criterion the delegate is assessed against. Changes save as you make them.

Add Requirements from the Library

Steps:

The requirement database is Readily's own library, already written and tagged to the rule each requirement comes from. Adding a package brings the regulatory text with it, so you do not retype citations.

Copy a Previous Year's Tool Forward

Building next year's tool usually means carrying most of this year's forward rather than starting over.

Steps:

Please note: Readily creates one audit tool per functional area. Keeping a template to a single functional area keeps reporting and corrective actions grouped the way you expect later in the audit.

Creating an audit sets its scope, pulls in the audit tool you will assess against, and lays out the dates that drive the audit timeline. The wizard has three steps.

Provide the Audit Details

Go to Audit Tool and click New Audit.

Steps:

Please note: The delegate, delegated function and line-of-business lists come from Delegate Management. If an option you need is missing, it is added there rather than in this wizard.

Configure the Audit Tools

The second step is where you attach the instrument. Readily matches the audit's details against your template metadata and pre-selects the template that fits. You can accept it, choose a different one, or add more than one tool if the audit covers several functional areas.

This step also sets access for the audit and lets you filter out requirements that do not apply to the lines of business you selected.

Set the Audit Dates

The third step sets two different kinds of date.

Steps:

The policy date check and the look-back period do different jobs. The look-back period is the window the audit examines. The policy date check only raises a flag when a submitted policy is older than the date you set — it does not decide which policies are collected, and it does not change which requirements the documents are reviewed against. Those come from the audit tool you attached in step 2.

Best practice: If your team tracks its own audit milestones, map them to these dates once. Readily then calculates each audit's timeline the same way, and you can schedule a year of audits without setting dates individually.

After the audit is created you land in its workspace, with Next Up prompting you to send the audit notice.

An audit's workspace is organized into six tabs. Each one holds a different part of the audit, and knowing which is which saves hunting for a document or a finding later. This article covers what you will find in each.

Overview

The tab an audit opens on. The left side lists the audit's reviews — the policy and procedure review, then each file review — with a score bar and percent compliance for each, and the cases reviewed against the cases selected. A Next Up banner names the task the audit is currently waiting on.

The right side carries three views of the audit's progress:

Please note: The Communication thread is shared. Anything posted there is visible to the delegate once the questionnaire has been published to them.

Evidence

Everything collected for the audit, counted by type — universes and policies. Policies are pulled in from SharePoint using Sync, and this is also where you upload a universe yourself or attach case files.

Findings

Every finding and observation raised across the audit, grouped by review type. Only requirements that carry a finding or an observation appear here, so an empty tab means nothing has been raised yet rather than that something is missing.

Questionnaire

The request sent to the delegate, and their responses. Before anything is sent this tab offers Create Draft questionnaire. Sending a request is covered in Sending the Audit Notice.

Report

The audit report. Until one has been generated the tab says so; once generated it holds the executive summary, the risk areas identified and every finding with its recommendation.

Options

The audit's tools and settings, gathered in one place: run the AI analysis over collected evidence, edit the audit tool's sections, scoring and dates, add requirements, and control which teammates can open the audit.

The look-back period and the policy date check set when the audit was created both live under Edit audit tool here, which is where you go to change them later.

The audit notice is what reaches the delegate. Readily turns the requirements in the audit's tools into a questionnaire — one question per requirement, carrying its regulatory text — and sends the delegate a link to respond. Everything happens on the Questionnaire tab.

Create the Draft

Open the audit and go to the Questionnaire tab. Before anything has been sent, the tab offers a single action.

Steps:

Review the Draft

A drafted questionnaire opens on Status. COLLECTIONS lists each group of questions with its state and due date — a new draft shows as Unpublished with no due date set. DELEGATE CONTACTS on the right shows who the request will go to.

Steps:

Please note: If RECIPIENTS reads that no one is involved with this item yet, use Manage to add the delegate contacts before publishing. A collection with no recipient has nowhere to go.

Check the Questions

The Questions view lists each requirement as the delegate will see it, with its published assessment, its draft assessment and any evidence attached. Use Set due date here to give the collection a deadline.

Publish to the Delegate

Steps:

Publishing gives the delegate access to Readily and emails them a link. The email itself is short — the requests, the regulatory text and the upload points all live on the platform. The notice, its timestamp and its content are recorded in the audit's Activity log.

Track What Comes Back

Once published, the questionnaire shows each question's response state and separates what still Needs Response from what has been submitted. From here you can also Export to Excel and Invite Team Members.

To see every questionnaire sent across all audits, open Audit Questionnaire from the sidebar.

Granting an Extension

Open Comments & Extensions from the questionnaire, change the due date for the collection that needs more time, and send a message with it. Delegates can also request an extension from their side for you to approve or deny.

Please note: The original due date and every extension are kept. A third extension does not overwrite the first two — all of them stay on the record, which is what you need when evidencing oversight later.

Most evidence arrives from the delegate through their portal. But you will often need to put documents into an audit yourself — a delegate who sent files by email, a universe you pulled internally, or case files you already hold. All of it happens on the Evidence tab.

Open the Evidence Tab

Open the audit and click Evidence. The chips along the top count what has arrived, split by type, so you can see whether the gap is a universe or a policy document before you go looking.

Add Policies and Procedures

Policy documents live in your organization's SharePoint, and the audit pulls from there. That is two actions, and the tab numbers them for you.

Steps:

Please note: Putting a file in SharePoint does not add it to the audit. Until you Sync, the audit will still show nothing — this is the single most common reason documents appear to be missing.

Best practice: Use Sync then Analyze unless you have a reason not to. It saves a step, and the analysis is what you will want next anyway. Give it time to finish — it reads every document you added.

Upload a Universe

From Upload and Manage Selections you can add a universe yourself rather than waiting for the delegate to submit one. Download the template for that file review first if you have not already, so the columns match and the automatic calculations work.

Once a universe is in, the file review offers the rest of the flow.

Steps:

Attach Case Files

Further down the Evidence tab, every case in the sample is listed with its own Attach control, so you can place a document against the case it belongs to. Upload and assign handles a batch of files in one pass instead of one at a time.

Please note: A file you upload on the delegate's behalf is recorded as submitted by you, not by them. Where it matters that the delegate produced the evidence, ask them to upload it through their portal instead.

Once the delegate has submitted their policies, Readily analyses them against each requirement and presents its reading alongside a workspace for yours. You record the assessment; Readily's analysis is advisory and never reaches the delegate or the report.

Open the Policy and Procedure Review

From the audit workspace, open Policy & Procedure Review. Readily starts its analysis automatically when documents are submitted. Each requirement opens as its own screen, with Previous and Next to move through them and a counter showing your position, such as Requirement 5 of 10.

The list shows every requirement under its element with the assessment recorded against it, so you can see how much of the review is done and jump straight to anything still open.

Steps:

Read the Analysis

The analysis breaks the requirement into its separate obligations - its parts - and reports on each one with a symbol at the front of the bullet. Where evidence was found, the passage it came from is cited so you can check it against the source document.

What each symbol means:

Two more symbols can appear above the parts, describing the documents rather than the requirement:

Please note: A part marked not applicable is excluded from the score rather than passed. If you disagree that a function is out of scope for this delegate, change your own assessment and say so in the feedback box - see What Do I Write When My Assessment Differs from Readily's?

Record Your Assessment

Steps:

Please note: Internal Auditor Notes are not shown to the delegate and do not appear on the report. Findings, recommendations and observations do.

Requesting More Information

Where you cannot decide without more evidence, set the assessment to indicate more information is required and write what you need. Readily collects every such request and sends them together when you complete the review, rather than as separate messages.

When the delegate responds, the new documents are analysed automatically and the analysis updates. Your assessment, findings and notes are left exactly as you wrote them until you change them yourself.

A file review starts from a universe: the full list of records the delegate reported for the audit period. You select a sample from it, request those case files, and review them. This article covers the universe and the sample.

Open the Universe

From the audit workspace, open the file review you want to work on. The header shows how many cases the universe holds, how many requirements apply, how many cases are compliant so far, and how many are fully reviewed.

Each row shows its identifier, how many of its assessments are complete, and its percentage. Upload universe loads a universe yourself; Start Review opens the first case.

Select Your Sample

Readily offers three ways to select, and they combine.

Steps:

To build a sample spread across categories — a set number of each provider type, for example — filter to one category, draw at random within it, then change the filter and draw again. Each draw adds to the same selection.

Request the Case Files

After you confirm the selection, Readily generates one request per selected case, showing the delegate the row data you selected on together with what the case file must contain. Publishing sends those requests through the same questionnaire the delegate is already using.

Check the Score Roll-Up

The Requirements view shows each requirement with the number of cases reviewed, the number that met it, and the resulting percentage.

That percentage is compared against the pass threshold configured for the audit to produce the factor's assessment.

Where the Expected Columns Come From

Each file review has a universe schema behind it. The schema defines the columns a delegate's universe must contain, which is what makes the automatic calculations and the scrubbing checks possible. Open it from Audit Tool Templates under Universe Schemas.

Each column lists its name and description, its type, and what it is used to calculate. Columns feeding a calculation name it, so you can see which fields a result depends on before the delegate submits anything.

Please note: Readily accepts a universe in whatever shape the delegate sends. Calculated results — turnaround times and similar — depend on the expected columns being present, so send the universe template with the audit notice.

Case file review works one case at a time. You complete the record's fields, score each requirement for that case, and record a deficiency wherever something was not met. This article covers the review screen and how to move through a sample.

Open a Case

From the file review, click Start Review to open the first case, or click any row to open that case. Previous and the case selector at the top move you between cases without returning to the list.

Choose Your Panes

The review screen is built from panes you show or hide, so you can set it up the way you work.

Steps:

Turning a pane on opens it beside the others; turning it off reclaims the space. Opening File Preview next to Case Detail keeps the evidence and the record side by side.

Complete the Case Record

The Case Detail pane carries the universe data and the fields you fill in during review, such as decision and verification dates. Hovering a field shows what it is and what it feeds.

A lightning-bolt icon marks a value Readily calculates rather than one you type. Where a requirement depends on dates already captured, the result is worked out for you, and hovering the icon shows the calculation behind it.

Score the Requirements

Steps:

Please note: Readily does not read the case files for you. Policies are analysed automatically and universe data is calculated, but case files are scored by hand. See Does Readily review case files automatically?

Please note: At case level you record a deficiency rather than a finding or an observation. While you are still reviewing individual cases you do not yet know which it will become. Once the review is complete, the deficiencies for a requirement are rolled up into a single finding or observation for the audit.

Open a Single Case Directly

Each case also has its own address. Opening a case directly is useful when you are working one specific record rather than moving through the sample in order — for example, returning to a case after the delegate has sent the document you asked for.

Roll Up the Results

When every case is reviewed, return to the Requirements view. Each requirement carries the share of cases that met it, compared against the audit's pass threshold. Readily summarises the deficiencies you recorded across the cases into one finding for that requirement, with a recommendation you can edit.

The audit report gathers the audit's results into one document: a summary of performance, the risks identified, and every finding with its recommendation. It is what you review and approve before any finding becomes a corrective action.

Complete the Reviews

Before a report can be produced, the reviews need to be finished. Completing a review shows a summary of what you recorded and flags anything outstanding — requirements with no assessment, or findings with no recommendation. You can complete the task anyway; the flags tell you what is missing.

Until a report has been generated, the Report tab shows that none exists yet.

Read the Report

Once generated, the report opens with the delegate's name, the number of risks identified, and an executive summary giving the overall compliance rate, the factors met, where performance was strong and where it was not.

Performance Highlights then sets out the areas that performed well, each with the percentage of factors met and whether the element is a must-pass.

Review the Findings

Below the summary, the report lists each finding with its recommendation and the regulatory citation captured during the review. This is the detail that is handed to the CAP Tracker, so it is worth reading before the report is approved.

Approve and Export

Steps:

Please note: Approval applies to the report as a whole rather than to individual findings. Where a specific finding needs discussion, raise it in the comment thread before the report is approved.

Best practice: Agree who approves reports before your first audit goes out. Readily does not block anyone with ownership of the audit from completing the approval task, so the list of approvers is a decision your team makes.

When an audit closes, its findings move to the CAP Tracker as corrective actions. This article covers that hand-off and what a CAP holds once it arrives.

Compile the Findings

From the completed audit report, start the corrective action step. Readily lays out every finding with its recommendation, regulatory citation and functional area — the detail captured during the review.

Steps:

Observations come across as well, marked as not requiring corrective action. Completing this step closes the audit, and the findings then live in the CAP Tracker.

Best practice: Set the owner per finding. Where two auditors split one audit, the owner is what lets each of them filter the board down to their own corrective actions later.

Find Your CAPs

Open CAP Tracker from the sidebar. The counters across the top separate findings needing a response, findings awaiting your review, and findings where a response has been drafted.

Steps:

Work a Single CAP

Opening a CAP shows the deficiency, the recommendation and the citation inherited from the audit factor, all editable. The panel on the right carries the delegate, the status, the owners and assignees, and the CAP timeline with each stage and its due date.

Below that, CAP Remediation holds the root causes the assignee identifies and, under each, the action plans with their planned completion dates and supporting evidence. You accept or reject each one with a reason, and Action Plan Progress tracks how much has been implemented.

See the Whole Board

Analytics summarises the CAP Tracker rather than one corrective action: how many are open against closed, who owns them, and how they are tracking against their due dates.

Please note: The back and forth stays on one CAP. Rejecting a response and asking for another does not create a second CAP — the whole exchange is held against the same deficiency and appears in the export.

The audit scorecard compares results across audits, so you can see how a delegate or a functional area has performed over time rather than looking at one audit in isolation.

Open the Scorecard

Steps:

The list shows each delegate with how many audits they have, and which years those audits cover.

Open One Delegate's Scorecard

Clicking Open on a delegate gathers every audit run against them, so you can see performance by functional area and by year rather than one audit at a time.

Please note: The scorecard reflects audits recorded in Readily. A delegate audited outside the platform will not appear in the comparison.

What Do I Write When My Assessment Differs from Readily's?

When you record an assessment that differs from Readily's, a prompt appears asking what was missed. The feedback goes to Readily's compliance team, who review it and adjust how the requirement is analysed. You are not writing instructions for a model, so plain language is enough.

How to Respond to the Prompt

Steps:

Two kinds of difference are worth naming when you see them:

Best practice: Say which part of the requirement the analysis got wrong and why your reading differs. Detail helps, but a short note that the requirement was misunderstood is still useful. There is no need to phrase feedback in any particular way.

Please note: Submitting feedback does not change your assessment. Your assessment is what carries through to the report.

Will Readily Find Evidence in a Document Submitted for a Different Question?

Yes. Readily reviews every document the delegate submitted, not only the one they attached to the question you are assessing.

How the Documents Are Searched

Two things happen when a delegate responds:

So if the answer to a utilization management question actually sits in the program description, and the delegate attached that document to a different question, the analysis will still find it and cite it.

Please note: This is also why a requirement can come back partially met when the delegate believes they answered it. The analysis reports what it found across the whole submission, and names what it could not find.

Best practice: Read the analysis before requesting more information. What looks like a missing document is sometimes evidence located somewhere you did not expect.

Does Readily Review Case Files Automatically?

No. Readily's AI reviews policies and procedures, and it calculates results from the universe you collect, but it does not read the case files themselves. Those you review and score by hand.

What Is Automated and What Is Not

Case files vary widely depending on the system they were produced in, to the point where an experienced auditor sometimes needs time to work out what a file is showing. Scoring them is left to the person who can make that judgment.

Please note: Readily also does not produce a pre-highlighted export of a document with the relevant passage marked for a regulator. The analysis identifies and cites the passage on screen, but exporting a highlighted copy is not available.

Why Aren't My Uploaded Documents Showing in the Audit?

If you have uploaded policies but the audit still shows none, the documents are in SharePoint but have not been pulled into the audit yet. Syncing brings them in.

Sync the Documents into the Audit

Steps:

Best practice: Use Begin P&P Analysis instead when you are starting a policy review. It syncs and then runs the analysis in one action, so there is no separate sync step to remember.

Please note: Uploading a file to SharePoint does not by itself add it to the audit. Until the documents are synced, the audit's document count stays at zero.