Comments
Every record in Alchex — a document, a register, a risk — carries the same Comments panel; write a note, name a teammate, and it reaches them.
A comment is a note about a record, written for the people who work on it. Every record in Alchex carries the same Comments panel — a document, a register, a risk, one of a risk's actions — and it works the same way in all of them: a list of messages in time order, newest at the bottom, with one box to write in. Say what you mean, name a teammate with @ if it needs to reach someone, and post.
There is nothing else to learn. A comment shows who wrote it, when, and what they said. There are no threads to manage, nothing to resolve, and no separate kinds of comment for different screens.
Where to find it
- A document — open Governance → the document, and press Comments in the top bar. The panel opens on the document's right edge, as every panel does.
- A register — open it and press Comments in its top bar. The conversation is the register's own — remarks left on individual rows in the past appear here too, in time order.
- A risk — open the risk record and press Comments in its top bar. An action opened from the risk carries the same box in its own panel.
The panel is the record's whole conversation. On a document that includes everything ever written about it — remarks made while drafting, notes reviewers left during approval rounds, and the notes Alchex leaves about its own edits — one list, oldest first.
Writing one
Type in the box — Write a comment · @ mentions notify — and press Comment (or ⌘/Ctrl + Enter). Posting is immediate; there is no draft state. Each comment can be up to 4,000 characters.
A long history costs nothing to avoid: the panel opens on the recent conversation and Show earlier comments walks back as far as you need.
If you can read the record, you can comment on it. Commenting is not an editing right: a reviewer or auditor with read-only access can ask a question, and often is the person who needs to. That is one rule across every place you can comment.
Your words are yours. Your own comments carry a ⋯ menu with Edit and Delete — point at the comment and it appears (on a touch screen it is simply visible). Nobody can rewrite or remove what someone else said, at any role. Deleting is soft: the line leaves the conversation, the record keeps its history.
Naming someone
Type @ and a list of your teammates opens. Keep typing to narrow it; a name matches on the start of any of its words, so @kay finds Deniz Kaya. Choose with the arrow keys and Enter, or click. Escape closes the list without touching what you have written, and an email address in prose (ops@alchex.com) does not open it at all.
Picking someone writes their name — just their name. The box reads @Deniz Kaya, exactly as the posted comment will, and a quiet line under the box — Notifies Deniz Kaya — tells you who this comment will reach before you press anything. Delete the name from the text and the line drops them: what the line says is exactly what happens.
The person you pick gets a notification carrying what the comment is on, who wrote it, and a short preview — and it opens straight to the record: a mention on a register opens the register, a mention on an action opens that action's panel on its risk, a mention on a document opens the document. So a question reaches the person it was asked of, instead of waiting for them to open the record.
Only the picker creates a mention. Typing @ayse by hand is ordinary text and notifies nobody — and the Notifies line under the box makes that visible instead of leaving it to be discovered. Mentioning yourself never notifies you, and naming the same person several times in one comment reaches them once. Editing a comment later never notifies anyone — to bring somebody new in, write a new comment.
It does not matter who — or what — wrote the comment. A register automation's remark or the assistant's note goes through the same door as yours, so a name in one reaches that person the same way.
Who can do what
| What you can do | Role needed on the record's team |
|---|---|
| Read the conversation | Reader or higher |
| Comment | Reader or higher |
| Edit or delete a comment | Its author only, at any role |
Reading is the whole permission. Workspace Owners and Admins count as Owners on every team, so they can always comment. See Permissions.
Your name on a comment is your account's display name — it is recorded when you post, so a comment keeps the name you had when you wrote it.
Comments during a review
A review needs conversation — a reviewer asking "does this cover vendor-managed systems?" before approving — and it happens in the same place as everything else: the document's Comments panel. A reviewer can read the document, so they can comment on it; the author reads the remarks in the panel and answers there.
Two things in a review are deliberately not comments:
- The decision note. When a reviewer sends a document back, the note they attach to that decision rides the decision itself — it is part of the record of why the review ended the way it did, and it shows on the document until the next submission. Detail beyond one sentence belongs in the panel, where it can be answered.
- The approval itself. Approving and publishing are recorded acts with their own history — see Submit and approve and Publishing.
Comments Alchex leaves
When you approve an edit the assistant proposed, it comments on what it did — in the same panel, as a message you can answer, not as a separate machine log. Every edit gets one, and each says three things: which section it changed, why, and where the change came from. "I rewrote Access review. You asked for the review to run quarterly rather than yearly. I made this while we were talking — the reasoning is in that conversation."
The comment is attributed to Alchex, not to you, even though you approved the change — a note about a machine's edit that carried a colleague's name would be a lie about who wrote it. Your own typing is never commented on.
One of these notes can settle itself: when the assistant flagged that a register the section cites was still holding unconfirmed records, confirming the last of those records closes precisely what the note asked, and Alchex leaves a closing message saying so. See Registers.
What became of anchored comments
Comments used to attach to a passage of a document — a highlight in the text, with a popover conversation — and reviews carried their own per-block threads. That was three readings of one thing, and it is gone: the panel is the one place, and a comment is about the record.
Nothing already written was lost. Comments made under the old model appear in the panel like any others, in time order, keeping who said them and when. The highlights simply no longer paint, and text you select in a draft offers formatting, not commenting. When a comment needs to be about a specific sentence, quote the sentence — the words say which passage you mean, and they keep saying it even after the passage is edited.
Practical advice
- Say which part you mean. "The retention table in §4 lists five years — the register says seven" travels better than "this looks wrong".
- Name the person who can answer. A comment nobody was mentioned in is a note on the record; a comment with an
@is a question in someone's inbox. - Don't use comments to record decisions. A decision that has to survive belongs in the document or the record itself, where reviews and versions protect it — see Collaboration.