AccessPoint vs. Workpro

The short answer

Workpro is a well-built, credible product from a long-established Scottish software house, and its reference list is unusual: the Office of the Scottish Information Commissioner, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales and other oversight bodies run their casework on it. It is also one of very few UK FOI products still available on-premise as well as SaaS, which is often the reason it makes a shortlist. The comparison comes down to what control means and how far the platform reaches. Workpro's answer to control is a deployment choice — their data centre or your servers. AccessPoint's answer is tenant residency: it deploys into the Microsoft 365 and Azure environment you already run, collects records from where they live, and carries DPIAs, breach response, complaints and a privacy risk register alongside the requests.

What is Workpro Requests – FOI, EIR and DPA case management software?

Workpro is made by Computer Application Services Ltd (CAS) of Edinburgh, a company that has been writing software since 1969 and has been employee-owned since 2014 — a rare profile in a market steadily consolidating into large groups. The information-rights product is sold and listed on G-Cloud under the exact name Workpro Requests – FOI, EIR and DPA case management software, and subject access handling is bundled with FOI rather than sold as a separate product.

Its customer list is worth reading closely, because it is dominated by the bodies that hold everyone else to account: the Office of the Scottish Information Commissioner, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman for England, the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales, the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission, Housing Ombudsman Services, and — a foothold outside the UK — Patient Ombudsman in Ontario. Winning the regulator's own office is a meaningful signal about defensibility and case discipline, and it is fair to say so.

Workpro is available as SaaS from UK data centres CAS describes as ISO 27001 certified, or on-premise on infrastructure you run yourself. That on-premise option has largely disappeared from this market, and for some authorities it is decisive. It is worth being clear about what it buys and what it costs: full physical control of the data, in exchange for servers, patching, backups and a disaster-recovery plan that are yours to own. AccessPoint offers no on-premise edition; its answer to the same concern is different in kind, which is what the rest of this page is about.

Workpro fact sheet

Product: Workpro Requests – FOI, EIR and DPA case management software
Vendor: Computer Application Services Ltd (CAS), Edinburgh — writing software since 1969, employee-owned since 2014
Deployment: SaaS from UK data centres described as ISO 27001 certified, or on-premise on your own infrastructure
Case types: FOI, EIR, and DPA / UK GDPR subject access requests — subject access bundled with FOI
Named customers: Office of the Scottish Information Commissioner, Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, Public Services Ombudsman for Wales, Scottish Legal Complaints Commission, Housing Ombudsman Services, Patient Ombudsman (Ontario)
Procurement: Listed on G-Cloud, the Crown Commercial Service framework most UK public bodies buy through

Sources

Workpro and AccessPoint, side by side

	Workpro	AccessPoint
Where your data lives	Your choice — CAS-hosted SaaS in UK data centres, or on-premise on servers you run and maintain	Your own Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant — cloud you already govern, with no servers to provision, patch or back up
Records collection	Documents brought into the case system	Searched and pulled straight from SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams, with an intake mailbox message becoming a request in one step
Scope	FOI, EIR and DPA subject access request handling in one system	The same three, plus DPIAs and algorithmic impact assessments, breach response with a live notification calculator, complaints and appeals, and an ISO 31000 privacy risk register
Regulator-side casework	Deep experience with oversight bodies — several UK commissioners and ombudsmen run their casework on it	Built for the authority side: requests, assessments, breaches, and the complaints and appeals an authority answers
Scotland	An Edinburgh vendor with a long Scottish track record; the Scottish Information Commissioner's own office is a customer	UK jurisdiction packs cover UK FOIA, EIR and the UK GDPR — Scotland runs under the separate FOISA 2002 regime, so ask us about current pack coverage before you assume it fits
Statutory configuration	Configured per customer during implementation	106 jurisdiction packs — the FOIA section 10 twenty-working-day clock, the EIR regulation 7 extension to 40, the UK GDPR one calendar-month subject access clock, exemptions and letters preloaded
Audit trail	Application audit logging	Append-only, hash-chained ledger across every module, with court-ready case audit exports
Pricing	Quoted, with pricing documents published per G-Cloud service	Flat annual USD $2,990 / $7,990 / $14,990 by organisation size, no per-user fees, billed through the Microsoft commercial marketplace

Competitor capabilities vary by product edition and configuration; this table reflects each product's public positioning as of August 2026.

Where Workpro fits

A fair comparison cuts both ways — Workpro is a reasonable choice when:

You genuinely require an on-premise deployment on infrastructure you own. Workpro is one of very few UK information-rights products that still offers it, and AccessPoint has no on-premise edition — it deploys into your Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant instead.
You are a Scottish public authority working to FOISA 2002 and the Scottish Information Commissioner. CAS is an Edinburgh company with a long Scottish record and the Commissioner's own office as a customer; AccessPoint's UK packs are built around UK FOIA, so talk to us about current FOISA coverage rather than assuming it.
You are an ombudsman, commissioner or complaints-handling body rather than a public authority answering requests. That is Workpro's home ground, and its reference list is your peer group.

Where AccessPoint differs

Control without the servers On-premise gives you the box; AccessPoint gives you the control without the box. It runs as a SharePoint web part or Teams app on an Azure backend deployed from a one-click Bicep or ARM template in your own tenant's subscription — your data, your identity, your security stack, and no hardware, patching or disaster-recovery plan of your own to maintain.

The whole mandate, not just requests FOIA, EIR and subject access requests are one part of an information-rights team's job. DPIAs before new processing, breach assessment against the 72-hour clock, the Article 30 record of processing, and the risk register run on the same platform and the same audit ledger — not in a parallel set of Word templates.

The statute, preloaded Jurisdiction packs carry the FOIA 2000 twenty-working-day clock with Part II exemptions and the section 2 public-interest test, the EIR 2004 exceptions with the regulation 12(2) presumption in favour of disclosure and the extension to 40 working days, and the UK GDPR one calendar-month subject access clock with the DPA 2018 Schedule 2 restrictions.

Priced in public Flat annual pricing published on the site, billed through the Microsoft commercial marketplace, no per-user fees, and a 30-day free trial in your own tenant. Azure hosting bills to you directly at typically around $175 a month with no vendor markup.

Migrating from Workpro to AccessPoint

Moving off a hosted or on-premise Workpro deployment means bringing years of FOI, EIR and subject access history with you — including cases still on the clock. AccessPoint's Data import & export panel is designed for that, with no ETL project and no cutover weekend.

Export your caseload to Excel from your current system's reporting. Any report that reaches a spreadsheet is enough — you do not need a database extract, and on an on-premise deployment you already have the access you need.
Download AccessPoint's import template from Settings → Data import & export. It is generated for your tenant, so its dropdowns already carry your own request types, stages and codes, and your existing case references travel with you in the Legacy reference column.
Upload and read the per-row validation report — created, skipped, errors — before anything imports, with a fix-and-reupload error workbook for the rows that need attention. Imports are create-only, so re-runs are always safe.
Stage your case documents in the pre-provisioned migration-staging container in your own tenant's Azure storage, with optional MD5 hash verification for chain of custody.
Import in the background. Records arrive with their status, due dates and documents intact, so in-progress cases simply carry on — there is no cutover, no notifications fire, nothing recomputes, and every record carries an Imported entry in the audit trail.

And symmetrically: AccessPoint's one-click business-readable export produces the same workbook the importer accepts, so leaving is as clean as arriving. Ask every vendor you shortlist for the equivalent answer in writing.

Plan your migration → · Data Import & Export guide · Migration & onboarding services

Questions people ask about Workpro and AccessPoint

What is Workpro and who makes it?

Workpro is case-management software from Computer Application Services Ltd (CAS), an Edinburgh company writing software since 1969 and employee-owned since 2014. Its information-rights service is listed on G-Cloud as Workpro Requests – FOI, EIR and DPA case management software, handling freedom of information, environmental information and data protection subject access requests in one system.

Who uses Workpro?

Its published customers are notable because so many of them are oversight bodies: the Office of the Scottish Information Commissioner, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman for England, the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales, the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission, Housing Ombudsman Services, and Patient Ombudsman in Ontario. If the regulator who would review your casework runs the same system, that is a fair point in the product's favour and worth weighing honestly.

Workpro can be installed on-premise. Can AccessPoint?

No, and that is a genuine difference rather than something to talk around. AccessPoint has no on-premise edition. What it has instead is tenant residency: it deploys into your own Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant from a one-click Bicep or ARM template, so requests, documents, assessments and audit history stay inside the environment your organisation already secures with Entra ID, Defender, Purview and Sentinel, and the publisher has no runtime access to it. If your requirement is specifically physical servers in your own building, Workpro's on-premise option is one of the few remaining in this market and AccessPoint will not meet it.

Does AccessPoint cover Scotland and FOISA?

AccessPoint's UK jurisdiction packs are built around the Freedom of Information Act 2000, the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 and the UK GDPR with the Data Protection Act 2018. Scotland runs under a separate statute, the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, with its own regulator, so please check current pack coverage for Scotland with us rather than assuming either way — we would rather tell you plainly than sell you a fit that is not there. Scottish authorities also handle EIR and UK GDPR subject access, which the UK packs do cover.

Can we migrate our Workpro history into AccessPoint?

Yes. Any Workpro report that reaches Excel maps into AccessPoint's tenant-generated import template — historical and in-progress cases keep their old references as legacy references, requestor contacts import alongside them, and case documents stage through your own tenant's Azure storage with optional hash verification. Imported records arrive with their status, due dates and documents intact, so open cases continue with no cutover, no notifications and nothing recomputed, each carrying an Imported entry in the audit trail.

Competitor information on this page is drawn from public sources — vendor websites, government reports, and press coverage — and was last reviewed in August 2026. Products evolve, and a comparison is never the whole story: capabilities vary by edition and configuration. Spot something out of date? Tell us and we'll correct it.