Templates and the marketplace

Browse ready-made document templates, each carrying its own processes and checks, and build or adopt a copy into one of your teams.

The Marketplace is Alchex's library of ready-made starting points: document templates that become your own policies, procedures, records and manuals, each carrying the processes and checks that keep it honest. Open it from Marketplace in the sidebar.

Nothing in the Marketplace is live in your workspace until you adopt it. Browsing is safe, and browsing is free of side effects.

Starting from a pack

The catalog opens with Start from a pack: working sets — the policy, the procedure that operates it and the record it feeds, each procedure carrying its own checks — assembled so your first move is a whole capability rather than one file. A pack card shows the real items inside it and an honest composition line ("2 procedures · 1 record").

A pack's page lists its contents in reading order, each row linking to that item's own page, and one Adopt all button. The dialog picks the team once; everything lands there as drafts. Two rules keep it safe:

Nothing is duplicated. Items already in your workspace are skipped, and say so.
Partial success is honest. Each item reports its own outcome — added, skipped, or couldn't adopt — and a failure never rolls back what landed.

A pack you have begun says so — "2 of 6 in your workspace" on its card and its page — and the catalog keeps your momentum visible: once something is in your workspace, a Complete what you started shelf offers its companions, each with the reason it is suggested ("From 'Internal audit, end to end' — 2 of 6 in your workspace", or "Pairs with 'Access Control Policy' — in your workspace"). The shelf only appears when there is something honest to say.

Finding something

The catalog is arranged as shelves by kind — Policies, Procedures, Registers & logs, and Manuals — each with its item count and, when a shelf holds more than a row, a View all door into the full list. Above the shelves sit the framework pills (each with its own count) and a search box (Search by clause, topic, or name…). Search matches the item name, the topic, and the clause it addresses, so you can arrive from either direction: "what covers supplier security" or "what covers clause 8.1" — typing anything switches the shelves for a results grid across the whole framework.

Inside a search or an open shelf, Sort orders the results by Name (A–Z) or Recently updated, and long lists are paged rather than shown all at once. If a search leaves nothing, the empty state offers Clear filters to get back.

Items that are shared across the standards in your catalog appear under every framework, so a general-purpose procedure shows up wherever it is relevant rather than hiding under one heading.

Every card previews the item's real content, not placeholder art: a document card carries the opening lines of the document itself, and a register card its actual columns with a few sample rows. Each kind also carries its own colour — the soft wash behind the preview and the kind label share one hue per kind, consistently across cards, packs and item pages — so after a minute of browsing the colour itself reads as navigation. Above the name sits the card's kind — Policy, Procedure, Record, or Manual. That is the type your copy will carry in Governance, not a separate browsing vocabulary. And an In your workspace mark appears if your workspace already has a copy. That mark is workspace-wide, not team-wide — if a colleague in another team adopted the item, you will see it marked too.

Under the name, every card carries a one-line description written for that item: what the template covers, with its reference code on the chip below. Two items that sound alike from their names — say a general operational-control procedure and a health-and-safety one — are told apart here, so you can pick from the shelf without opening both.

A card has no reader of its own: the miniature is the preview, and the card's name opens the item's page.

If nothing matches, the page says No items match and suggests changing the search or clearing it.

Reading an item before you take it

Open any card for the full item page. Everything the page can honestly tell you about the item is on it — there is no second, larger window to open, and nothing you read here touches your workspace.

The page says what the document will cover. Beside the name sits one plain line per part of the document, under the heading What this policy will cover (or procedure, record, manual, following the kind above the name), with the note that roles and definitions are written from the people and terms you name and that sections which do not apply to you are not written. That is the honest preview, because the document is written with you — see Building a document together below. A template that instead hands over a filled copy shows the copy itself: the complete document in its real form, scrollable, beside a Document outline whose entries jump the page to that section.

What you get sits beside the name and states, from the item's real content: how many sections a document has and how many questions personalize it to your organization, where the copy lands, and that the copy is yours to edit — the marketplace original never changes underneath you.

Under the content, the meta line names the publisher, version and date — followed by the Version history: every version with its date and changelog line, newest first.

At the bottom, Works together offers three companions from the same framework — other kinds first, matched on the item's topic (a policy's procedure, the record it feeds), with Browse all back to the full catalogue.

Adopting a copy

A pack's shelf describes it as a working set — the documents, the record they feed, and the checks that run on them — because since the auditor cards folded into their procedures (2026-09-09) the checks are the documents' own review processes, not a separate auditor.

Adopt is for whole packs and kits. Every document template is written with you now rather than handed over as a filled copy, so a document's own record offers Build instead — see Building a document together below. A pack's page still offers Adopt all, and the assistant's kits arrive the same way: a set of documents as filled copies, with their built-in processes, in one step. Everything in this section describes that path.

Choose Adopt all to open Adopt into a team. Three things happen there:

Pick the team. Each team you can author in is listed with your role. Everything lands in that team's Governance list as drafts ready to edit and publish.
Name it. Name in your workspace is prefilled with the item's name. Renaming here renames your copy only — the catalog item is untouched, and you can rename again later.
Confirm. The copy is created, the item page says where it landed with a link straight to it, and the item switches to In your workspace · open your copy. Going back to the catalogue shows the In your workspace mark on its card right away.

The copy opens on its content, not on ceremony: the item's name becomes the document title (so a template that also wrote its name as the first heading does not say it twice), and its clause mapping lands on the document itself rather than as text at the top.

A few rules are worth knowing:

You always get the latest version. There is no way to pin an older one.
You need author access. If you have none in any team, the dialog says so and there is nowhere to adopt into. Choosing a team you are not a member of is refused outright rather than quietly redirected. See Permissions.
Adopting again is allowed and makes a second, separate copy. It does not overwrite the first.
Failures create nothing. If the adoption errors you get Couldn't adopt. Nothing was created. and a Retry.

Building a document together

Document templates are not adopted as a filled copy at all — every one of them is written with you. The record shows Build this procedure (or policy, record, manual, after the kind above the name) instead of Adopt, one sentence under it — A short conversation, one question at a time. Each section is written for you to keep or change. — and, where the full text would otherwise be, What this procedure will cover: one plain line per part of the document, with the note that roles and definitions are written from the people and terms you name, and that sections which do not apply to you are not written. Nothing is downloaded, and there is no template text to read first: the document is written with you, in your own words and with your own tool names, so the honest preview is what the conversation will cover.

What happens when you press Build. You are taken to the conversation, with the template already in hand, and the assistant asks which team the document should go into. Only the teams you can add documents to are offered: up to four as choices you can tap, more as a short list you can filter. You can also simply type the team's name; the assistant asks again only if the name matches none of your teams or more than one. With exactly one eligible team the question is skipped. If you have author access in no team, Build is disabled and the record says so, exactly as Adopt does.

On your answer the document is created in that team under the template's name and opens in the read-only preview beside the conversation — you stay in the conversation that is writing it, and the document's own page is one click away from the preview — and the assistant confirms in one clause — Done, it is in Engineering. — before asking its first question. From then on the document's own assistant door brings you back to this same conversation. The new document holds the section headings, in their fixed order, each over a single line reading Not written yet. It is an ordinary document from that moment: you can rename it, edit it and find it in the team's Governance list, where its row reads Being built · 3 of 10 until it is finished.

If your organisation has answered before. When the same document, or another that shares its questions, was built earlier in your organisation, the new document starts with those answers already in place. The assistant says so in a sentence, asks only what is still missing, and writes the sections it already has enough for. A section your earlier answers rule out is not in the new document at all. Nobody answers the same question twice, and the assistant takes your answer at your own precision rather than pressing for a deadline or a title you did not give. If you answered a question before it was asked, earlier in the same conversation, it uses that answer instead of asking again.

The conversation. The assistant asks about one topic at a time — how you plan your audits, who does them, what happens when one finds something — as a single question rather than a question per detail, and it says why when the reason is not obvious. Answer in your own words, at whatever length suits you: everything your answer covered is taken, and only what is genuinely still missing comes back, named together in one follow-up rather than one turn each. It never shows you a code, an identifier or a checklist, and it never tells you how a document "should" read: where you have no practice for something the document needs, it says so, offers a common practice sized to an organisation like yours, and marks what you accept as adopted rather than as something you said.

It will not write down something it cannot do. If you tell it a register, log or tracker lives somewhere else — a spreadsheet, a board in another tool — it asks once whether to bring it into Alchex. Say yes and what the document claims about that register can be checked against real rows. Say no and that is the end of it: the document still describes your register, and the assistant will not write a check or a count against records it cannot read. It also pushes back, in plain words, on an answer an auditor would fail you for — one person approving their own work, a finding closed with nobody checking the fix worked — and offers what to do instead.

Before it says the document is done it reads the draft against what that kind of document has to cover and fixes what it catches, then offers the forms the document refers to. It closes by naming anything you still have to decide internally, and every assumption it marked as ours, so nothing from us is mistaken for something from you. When it knows enough for a section it says what it understood in a sentence or two, writes the section into the document in place of Not written yet., and asks you to keep it or say what to change:

Say "keep it" and the section is kept; the conversation moves on. There is no button to find — the assistant asks in words and you answer in words, and you can say "keep them all" once rather than answering nine times.
Tell it what to change and it rewrites that same section from what you said.
Each written section is offered to you one at a time, and the offer waits for you: if the panel is not ready to show it yet, it comes back at the end of the next turn rather than being lost. Moving from the template to the document it creates does not lose the thread of the conversation.
A build's sections do not wait for the Apply button. Where your team's permission mode holds the assistant's changes until you press Apply, a document being built is the exception: the section is written and then offered to you as Keep it or Change something, which is the same permission asked in the build's own words. Once the build is finished the document is an ordinary one again and its edits wait for Apply like any other.
Sections arrive a few at a time. When your organisation has built something before, the assistant starts from the answers you already gave — so a document can have everything it needs from the very first message. It still writes a few sections at a time rather than the whole document at once, and offers each one for you to keep or change before the next batch. Writing everything in a single reply would run past the length one reply is allowed and be cut off, and it would also hand you a finished document to review in bulk instead of a conversation you can steer.
A section says what you told it. A section is written from particular answers of yours, and it is not shown to you until it carries them. If a draft describes the topic but leaves one of your answers out — the out-of-hours route you described, the person you named — you never see that draft: the assistant writes the section again with your answer in it. Reworded is fine; missing is not.
Editing a section yourself, in the document, counts as keeping it. Only your words count: a section the assistant wrote is not kept until you keep it or change its words — and when the editor cannot show which version you typed over, the section keeps its card and waits for you rather than counting itself kept. The assistant writes only into the sections the template lists; it never adds a heading of its own.

A section that does not apply to you — a classification scheme you do not have, a review you never do — is not written, and its heading leaves the document. The panel's header reads {name} · Section 4 of 9 with a thin progress rule of kept sections; the document page shows Being written · 3 of 9 sections kept above the editor with Continue, which reopens the conversation where it stopped. Leaving and coming back is opening the document again: the document is the only draft, and what was written stays written.

Finishing. The document is finished when every question it needs answered has been answered and every section has been kept. The assistant then says so and stops — Your Change Management Procedure is written and in Engineering. When you want the recurring work it describes to run, build its processes from the Workflow panel. Asking it to finish earlier gets you the one thing still missing, as a question, never a document with a gap in it.

And that second sentence is the whole of what happens next. A finished procedure is prose the workflow builder reads like any other: the approval your document describes becomes an approval step, the review interval it names becomes a schedule. Nothing is switched on for you at the end of the conversation — you open the record's Workflow panel and build from the text when you want it, exactly as you would for a document you wrote yourself.

Which templates build this way. All of them. Every document template in the catalogue — policy, procedure, record and manual — is written with you, and the record says so with Build this {kind} above its plain list of what the document will cover. There is nothing to switch on and no list to check first. There is no separate auditor to adopt either: the checks an auditor used to run are the review process of the procedure they belong to, written with the rest of it.

Two honest rules, both unchanged from adopting: a failure to start says Couldn't start. Nothing was created. with a Retry, and pressing Build again starts a second, separate document — it never overwrites the first. A pack's Adopt all keeps everything above.

Bracketed fields and answers

Templates are written with bracketed choices where the author expects your specifics — a review frequency, a permitted-or-not decision. Where Alchex knows the answer, it is filled in before the document is created, so your first sight of the document is already yours.

Anything unanswered stays exactly as the author wrote it. The remaining brackets are the outstanding questions — there is no separate checklist to keep in sync, and Alchex never invents an answer to fill a gap.

Not every bracket becomes a question. Where the author already put a working value in the bracket — a review cadence, a chase-up window, a worked example row — that value is a recommendation, not a blank. Those are applied for you and listed in the summary of what was filled in, so you can see and change them without being asked to retype a decision the author already made. Brackets that genuinely need you — the ones naming your sites, your regulator, a legal deadline, a limit on your permit — are the ones you are asked about.

The template's own note about being a template does not come with you. On the marketplace page, a document's opening section says it is a template and that the bracketed sections must be adapted before approval — useful while you are deciding whether to adopt it. Your copy does not carry that sentence: it is addressed to whoever is choosing the template, not to the colleague who will read your issued policy, and an approved policy that still describes itself as an unadapted template is exactly the kind of thing an auditor reads as a control nobody ever specified. Every real bracketed decision is left untouched — only the note about brackets is dropped.

Templates that come with their processes built in

Some procedure templates ship with their processes — the recurring work the procedure describes, already written as processes the way the workflow builder would build them: one process per sentence that says when something happens, each with its own on/off switch. When such a template arrives as a filled copy — through a pack's Adopt all, or a kit the assistant creates for you — the processes are installed with your copy, in the same step, with no AI involved: the same sentences, the same steps, every time.

Your answers do double duty. A bracket that asks how often something happens sets the schedule of the process that runs it; a bracket that asks who decides names the decider of the approval step. Answer the questions and the processes arrive switched on (the same default as a process the builder makes for you); leave them and the author's wording stands.

Every template is written process-first. Instead of a long document with its processes listed at the end, the document is its processes. Document Control Procedure is the worked example: After a one-paragraph purpose, each section is one process — When a document is created, When a document is submitted for review, Review of this procedure and of every controlled document, When a document is archived — and opens with the sentence that says when it runs. A short Rules section holds what people must do without a process behind it, and Records what is kept. The review's checks are the ones its auditor agent used to run, so there is no separate auditor to adopt for it: the procedure checks itself on its own schedule and asks the approving role to sign off the outcome. It asks seven questions in total, and every one of them either sets a process's schedule, names who decides, or fills a word the document needs. Every template in the catalogue is written this way, and the auditor agents that used to sit beside them are gone: their checks are the review process of the procedure they belong to.

Building a document installs no processes on its own. When the conversation finishes you have a document, not a set of running automations. The workflow builder then reads your finished prose exactly as it reads any other document's — the approval a sentence describes becomes an approval step you choose to build. That is deliberate: an interview that quietly switched on recurring work at the end would be automation nobody asked for, and a conversation you walked away from would leave some behind. A filled copy is the other case, and the difference is that there the processes were authored with the template rather than derived from what you just said.

The Adopt dialog asks you for a name and a team, and nothing else. It does not ask the template's questions: a form that set a document's review cadence and approver before you had even read it would be a second way to say what the document's own sentences already say, and Alchex has no built-in review cycle or approval step to configure — those exist only where a procedure's sentence puts them. So adopt first, read your copy, and fill a bracket by editing the sentence it sits in, or by telling the assistant. A conversation can still gather the answers as it drafts, because there the answers arrive as an edit to the document you confirm.

Two honest rules keep this from ever pretending:

An unanswered question leaves its process switched off, and the text is where it is answered. The process is installed and listed — its row reads Needs 1 answer, its switch is greyed, and opening it names the question the template asked, in the template's own words, with one door: In the text, which takes you to the bracket in your copy. Write the answer there and save; the process is rebuilt from your sentence and its switch comes back. Alchex never fills the gap with a guess, and never runs a process on the author's placeholder.
A "who decides" answer must name a team role — admin, author or viewer — because those are the only roles a process can resolve to real people. A job title ("Quality Manager") is kept in the document as your answer, but the process it would have pointed at stays switched off; the open process quotes your answer back and says what it could not be read as, and the document's activity records the same.

A process whose sentence was removed by scope tailoring (a section for a framework you have not adopted) is not installed at all; the activity entry records which ones were left out. Everything installed is an ordinary process from then on: it shows in the Workflow panel with its switch, its runs land their receipts, and editing the sentence in your copy is yours to do — the processes do not rewrite themselves.

Questions that ask where records are kept

Some of a template's questions are not really asking for a phrase. "Where is completed training recorded?" has no honest sentence answer — the honest answer names a register you keep. Typing "the training log" into the document records a claim: nobody reading it can check that the log exists or that anything is in it.

So when the assistant reaches one of those questions, it asks in the conversation and offers the real ways out — all answered by replying, like everything else in chat:

Answer	What it does
Name an existing register	The assistant reads your registers and binds the one you name. An empty register is still a real answer — "we point at this log, and nobody has confirmed a record in it" is honest, and hiding it would be worse.
Ask it to create the register	The assistant proposes the register with any rows it can take from your conversation; the rows land as suggestions until somebody confirms them.
Type a phrase	Unchanged and still first-class — a typed answer is a perfectly good answer.
Say "decide later"	Parks it. The bracket stays open, and the assistant does not raise it again in this session.

Binding a register records the register itself rather than words about it, so the answer points at something that can be looked at. A typed answer is not chased: the assistant may offer once, when the subject is already in front of you, to point that answer at a real register instead — and if you pass, it drops the matter.

An answer that names a register never counts as an outstanding question afterwards. The remaining brackets stay an honest list of what is still undecided.

Taking a whole set at once

When Ask Alchex proposes a set of missing documents, it creates them as one set — the card lists every document and shows a result per row as they land. If you only want some of the set, say so before it proposes (or ask it to archive the ones you did not want — archiving is always reversible). Answers you gave are applied across the set, and each template keeps only the answers it actually asks for.

The result is honest about partial success: if some documents could not be created, the card tells you how many landed and how many failed rather than rolling everything back.

Creating documents — starting from scratch instead.
Registers — the logs a record-source answer points at.
Controls and evidence — what a control does once it has evidence.
Publishing — turning your copy into a version people read.

Kits for a situation

Some situations need a set of documents rather than one: a first management system for a software company, a first internal audit cycle, a cloud provider you build on, personal data you process for your customers. Ask the assistant for a kit by situation and it offers the set as one card, in reading order, with the guidance each document was written from and, where your jurisdiction makes it relevant, the regulation articles behind it. Drop the documents you already have before you approve; the rest are created together and personalised with the answers you give once.

A kit is a starting set, not a mandate. The assistant cites the guidance as recommended practice and the regulations only for the jurisdictions you are in.