User Guide

The User Guide covers everything you do inside AccessPoint — from logging an access request to running a privacy assessment, handling an incident, or building a report. Jump to the area you work in below. Each page matches a screen you can open the in-app Help (?) button from.

Privacy note: Custodians and contributors always work from sanitized instructions and never see requestor personal information. Only coordinators, reviewers, and privacy staff see requestor identity.

Start here

• Case workflows — process & actors — how the four case types share one spine: their lifecycle stages, who does what, and where the work lives
• Get started — the Get started checklist on My Day, Guide me tours, and first-time tips
• Follow-ups and reminders — the Follow-ups card on every case, personal reminders, and statutory waiting periods

Dashboards & views

• My Day — the prioritized personal feed and pinned report tiles (the default landing tab)
• Requests dashboard — searching, filtering, sorting, and managing the request list
• Assignments dashboard — a custodian's assigned work across requests and assessments
• Tasks dashboard — a contributor's task assignments, uploads, and completion
• Reviews dashboard — reviewing submissions, approving, or requesting changes
• Dashboard views — saving and switching between column, filter, and sort configurations
• Assessments dashboard — the PIA/AIA register list, stat cards, and starting a new assessment
• Incidents dashboard — the breach register, stat cards, and reporting a new incident
• Complaints dashboard — complaints and appeals with their statutory clocks, and registering from email
• Audits board — internal privacy audits and regulator reviews on one board, with findings and overdue actions
• Risks dashboard — the standalone risk register view and the risk portfolio analysis card

Access requests

• Portal inbox — submissions from the public portal: triage, promote, merge, or reject
• Creating requests — request type, requestor picker, and intake details
• Request overview — status, key dates, scope, extensions, and the lifecycle rail
• Requestor — requestor contact, communication preferences, and correspondence history
• Assignments — creating custodian assignments, instructions, and collection progress
• Documents — the review workspace: upload, tags, families, read tracking, and redaction
• Collaboration — advisors, readers, consultations, and internal comments
• Response & fees — the next-step card, fees, response method, closure with its completeness check, and the case audit export
• Activity — the audit trail of changes, status transitions, and user actions
• Mark package as sent — recording how and when a response package reached the requestor

Documents & redaction

• Documents workspace — upload, tag, triage, redact, and package records with exemptions
• Duplicate documents — decision-based duplicate handling with an authoritative copy and redaction propagation
• Video & audio records — the media viewer, transcripts, time-based marks, detection, and release

Assignments, tasks & delegation

• Assignment details — instructions, tasks, documents, attestation, and approve/request-changes
• Task details — instructions, repository outcomes, documents, hours, and submit
• Repository details — a records source, its search outcomes, and task association
• Delegations — arranging a colleague to cover your work while you're away (an access overlay, not a reassignment)

Requestors & contacts

• Requestors & contacts — the contacts workspace: requestors, institutions, intake queue, and consultation contacts
• Requestor contact — identity, language, fee category, flow control, the Conduct (F&V) workspace, and merge
• Requestor institution — organization identity, affiliated contacts, active-request caps, and merge

Consultations & correspondence

• Consultations — consultation parties, statutory windows, correspondence, and outcome
• Correspondence — a logged or generated communication with the requestor and its thread
• Sending correspondence — the template library, merge fields, and send/capture with the PII firewall

Privacy assessments & ROPA

• Creating assessments — starting a PIA/AIA/Security assessment with a type, template, and screener
• Assessment details — sections filler, section assignments, risks, documents, review, and closure
• Section assignments — assigning a questionnaire section to a collaborator and merging their draft
• DPIA validation — opinions, the decision, and the Validation tab on assessments that configure it
• Section evaluation — rating each section of an assessment during review
• Regulator consultation — recording a prior consultation or submission to the regulator
• Risk map and risk overview — risks before and after the corrective measures
• Privacy program — the hub: overview, inventory, position, readiness by law, discovery, and rules
• Discovery and discovery surveys — domain catalogues, signals, and surveys of what units run
• Privacy subjects — the inventory of reusable privacy subjects (programs, systems, and more), their Art.30 ROPA records, and linked controls
• Systems register — the systems your programs run on, their vendors, and their risks
• Vendor register — vendors, their agreements and terms, and contracts ending
• Privacy subject details — identity, records of processing, and assessment/incident history

Privacy audits

• Starting an audit — New audit: the audit type, questionnaire, engagement, and team
• Audit details — the audit panel: engagement, fieldwork, report, and management actions
• Audit findings — the findings register: condition, criterion, cause, effect, and closure
• Evidence requests — the evidence list for an audit and how items are tracked

Incidents & breaches

• Creating incidents — logging a privacy incident or breach record
• Incident details — facts, containment, risk of harm, notifications, remediation, and closure
• Incident measures — a containment or remediation measure, its type, effectiveness, and progress

Complaints & appeals

• Creating complaints — registering a complaint or appeal record
• Complaint details — parties, statutory clocks, allegations and findings, correspondence, investigation, and closure
• Complaint workstreams — a delegated line of investigation: findings work product and the submit → review lifecycle

Risks & commitments

• Risk details — risk rating, management cards, treatment plan, KRI monitoring, and closure
• Risk treatment tasks — a mitigation action on a risk's treatment plan
• Risk indicators — key risk indicators (KRIs): thresholds, readings, and monitoring cadence
• Commitments — a tracked promise or measure with cadence and check-ins

AI Assist

• Ask AccessPoint (case assistant) — the read-only assistant on a case: grounded, cited answers, Draft this letter, and the My caseload mode

Reports & analytics

• Reports — the report period selector and grouped menu of fixed reports
• Case hygiene — open QA findings across every open case, from the same deterministic rules as the per-case Case check card
• AI systems register — deployment, risk class, human involvement, and derived approval position of ADM-flagged privacy subjects
• Custom reports & Report Studio — dashboards of report widgets: subject, groupings, measures, filters, and export
• Retention review — records past their retention period across all five registers, and the purge workflow
• Disposition — keeping only what was released, or only the case record

Case archiving & storage

• Files in archive storage — archived files, restores, removed previews, and the storage banner on a case
• Preservation holds on a case — placing and releasing a hold that stops any deletion
• Storage report — what case files occupy, by kind and storage tier, and what policies save

Audit, intake & training reports

• Audit portfolio — where your audit plan stands
• Audit findings report — open findings by rating, status, and repeat
• Audit actions report — management actions, owners, and what is overdue
• Control testing report — control tests and their results
• Audit performance report — timeliness of audits against plan
• Intake quality — clarification rate, time to first assignment, and scope completeness by channel
• Fees collected — fees paid online and offline, for reconciliation
• Received-date corrections — who corrected what, why, and by how many days
• Departed users — people who left with open work, and reassigning it
• Training readiness — assigned training completed, people who practised, and exercises held
• Exercise activity — team exercises held in the period

Training

• Training hub — the Training button: Get started, training cases, your paths, and exercises
• Train mode — the training copy of your organization, and what never leaves it
• Training cases — fictional cases to practise on, with their guides
• Guide me — tours that highlight the real control on the real screen
• Training paths — assigned paths of first tasks, training cases, and help pages
• Team exercises — a shared scenario with injects and an exercise clock

Notifications

• Notifications — the in-app feed of reminders and activity notices
• Notification preferences — per-category email and in-app opt-in and reminder settings