How it works
From the buyer's workbook to cited, approved answers
Qlara drafts answers only from documents your team has approved, shows the source for each draft, flags missing evidence as GAP, and writes the approved answers back into the file the buyer sent. Here is the whole workflow, and what it does not do.
Workflow
01
Upload the sources you have approved
Add your security policy, access control, incident response, continuity, hosting, and privacy documents to the knowledge base, or paste text directly. These are the only material Qlara may cite.
Accepted files: PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), CSV, TXT, and Markdown, up to 10 files at a time and 4 MB each. Text in an uploaded document that tries to instruct the AI is removed and reported, not followed.
02
Import the buyer's workbook and confirm the columns
Upload the questionnaire as .xlsx, CSV, or PDF (up to 4 MB), paste the questions, or start from a standard pack. Qlara finds the question column and the supplier response columns.
Before anything is written, you confirm which columns are supplier fields: the answer, an optional comment column, and an evidence column. Buyer-owned columns such as risk ratings and notes are never overwritten.
03
Review cited drafts, and the rows flagged GAP
For each question Qlara retrieves the best-matching approved sources and drafts a short answer that cites them. If no source supports an answer, the row is flagged as GAP instead of being filled with a guess. Drafts that claim a certification your sources do not support are flagged for review.
Each row shows the source excerpt next to the draft, so the reviewer can check dates, scope, and numbers against the evidence.
04
Approve each answer against the current source
A person approves every answer, edits it, or confirms a GAP. Approval is tied to the exact version of each cited source. If a source changes after approval, the answer must be reviewed again before a buyer-ready export.
Good answers can be saved back to the knowledge base for the next questionnaire.
05
Export into the buyer's original file
Qlara writes approved answers into the buyer's own workbook, in the columns you confirmed, and keeps the other sheets, formulas, and formatting. If the buyer defines evidence IDs (for example E-01), Qlara uses them when the document match is unambiguous. CSV export is also available.
A buyer-ready export needs every row approved. An internal working export can include open rows, and Qlara marks that file as an internal draft.
Download a fictional before-and-after example
Two Excel files: a short questionnaire from an invented buyer, and the same file after Qlara's export. The buyer, supplier, sources, and answers are all fictional. The answers and review decisions were written by hand for this example, and the "after" file was produced by Qlara's own export code, the same code the workspace uses to write into the original file.
- Six rows have approved, cited answers, with the buyer's evidence IDs filled in.
- One row (the penetration test date) is GAP: no approved source contained a date.
- One row (ISO/IEC 27001 certificate) still needs review, so the export is marked as an internal draft, not a file to send.
- The buyer's rating and notes columns are untouched.
Limits and what Qlara does not do
- Up to 200 questions per questionnaire. A larger workbook is rejected with no rows imported, so split it first.
- Files up to 4 MB. Questionnaires import from .xlsx, CSV, or PDF.
- Legacy .xls and .doc files are not supported. Save them as .xlsx or .docx first.
- Password-protected workbooks are rejected. Remove the password and upload again.
- Qlara only knows what is in your knowledge base. Missing or outdated sources produce GAP rows or wrong drafts.
- AI drafts can be wrong, incomplete, or cite the wrong passage. Human review is required before anything is sent.
- Qlara is decision support. It is not legal advice, not an audit, and not a certification, and Qlara itself holds no SOC 2 report or ISO 27001 certificate.