Policy management

How to publish company policies in Factura HRMS: write versions, set the audience, track who has acknowledged, and archive old policies.

For HR admin, Employee · Last reviewed 9 October 2026

Overview

The Policy Management module is a single, versioned home for your company's HR policies — the employee handbook, code of conduct, leave rules, IT & security policy, health & safety procedures, and anything else employees are expected to know and follow. It replaces scattered Word/PDF files with a system that can prove, on demand, exactly what an employee agreed to and when.

Who uses it

• HR administrators and managers create policies, write or upload their content, decide who each policy applies to, publish new versions, and monitor who has acknowledged what.
• Every employee reads and acknowledges the policies that apply to them from Employee Self-Service (ESS) — via My Policies.

Why it matters — the core value

1. A compliance record you can actually produce. For every employee and every policy version, the system can show: did they acknowledge it, when, from where, and was the document they saw the exact same one HR published — verified by a cryptographic fingerprint (SHA-256), not just a checkbox in a spreadsheet.
2. Disciplinary integration. A disciplinary case can cite the specific policy an employee is alleged to have broken, and the case screen shows — from the same evidence — whether that employee ever acknowledged it.
3. An optional AI answer layer. Employees can ask plain-language questions ("how many sick days do I get?") and get an answer sourced only from their own company's currently applicable policies, with a citation back to the source. This is off by default and is a deliberate, disclosed exception to the platform's usual rule of never sending personal data to an AI provider (see §11).

Read this first — one behavior changes how you should operate the module today: publishing a policy and sending a reminder do not currently send an email. The screens say "notifies the audience" and "N reminder(s) queued," but the actual email delivery step is on hold pending an infrastructure credential update. Until that lands, employees only learn about a new or pending policy by visiting My Policies themselves. If you need certainty that everyone has seen a new policy, tell people directly (chat, standup, an email of your own) in addition to publishing it here.

Articles in this guide

1. How do I get started with policy management?Policy Management is enabled for your company by Factura support (or at setup) as a company setting.
2. How do I create a draft policy?Click New Policy on the list.
3. How do policy versions work?A policy is a container ; its actual wording lives in one or more Versions .
4. How do I publish a policy?Once a draft version has content, a Publish vN call-to-action appears below the version list.
5. How do I choose who must read a policy?The Audience tab decides who is required to acknowledge a policy.
6. How do I track who has acknowledged a policy?The Compliance tab is where you see, at a glance, who has and hasn't acknowledged a policy.
7. How do I archive a policy?Archive Policy is available from the ⋯ menu on a published policy's header (not on Drafts).
8. How do employees acknowledge policies?Every employee sees a card grid at My Policies , showing only the published policies that currently apply to…
9. How do I cite a policy in a case?On a disciplinary case's edit screen, HR can select a Cited Policy — the policy the case alleges was violated.
10. How does the policy assistant work?A small Policy Assistant panel appears at the bottom of My Policies — but only when your company has turned…

Permissions & Access Control

A few rules enforced regardless of role:

• Everything is scoped to your own company — a policy, version, file, or acknowledgment belonging to another company is never visible, even by direct link.
• A version's uploaded file can only be streamed by an administrator, or by an employee whose audience actually includes that policy — being merely logged in isn't enough.
• Only Draft versions can be edited or have their file replaced; a published version is locked regardless of what's sent to the system.
• Published policies can only be archived, never deleted, because they carry acknowledgment evidence.

Common Use Cases

A. Publish the Employee Handbook to the whole company

1. New Policy → Title "Employee Handbook", Category "HR General", fill in Summary and Owner. Save.
2. Content & Versions → New Draft Version → paste in the handbook text (or leave text minimal and instead Upload Document with the official PDF) → Save.
3. Audience → Add audience rule → Target Type "All Employees" → Save Audience.
4. Back in Content & Versions, click Publish v1. Confirm.
5. The policy status becomes Published, the version is sealed with its fingerprint, and it now appears in every employee's My Policies.

B. Chase pending acknowledgments before a deadline

1. Open the policy → Compliance tab.
2. Leave the toggle on Live view (Snapshot view can't send reminders).
3. Check the Pending count and scan the grid for who's outstanding.
4. Click Remind N pending. This confirms the pending count for you — remember it does not currently email anyone (see §1), so follow up with those employees directly if the deadline is firm.

C. Cite a policy on a disciplinary case

1. Open (or create) the disciplinary case → the case editor.
2. In the Cited Policy field, select the relevant policy.
3. The acknowledgment chip appears automatically, showing whether the employee involved has ever acknowledged that policy — use this as part of your case documentation.

D. Publish a minor wording fix without forcing everyone to re-acknowledge

1. Open the policy → Content & Versions → New Draft Version.
2. Write a short Change Summary describing the fix.
3. Turn "Require re-acknowledgment from everyone" OFF.
4. Publish. Everyone who had acknowledged the previous version shows as Carried on the new one in Compliance — no new action is demanded of them, and nobody sees a "What changed" prompt for a change that isn't substantive.

E. An employee acknowledges a policy (ESS)

1. From My Policies, click Read & Acknowledge on a card marked "Action needed."
2. Read the policy text (and/or open the attached document). Note any "What changed" callout if this is a re-acknowledgment.
3. Tick the consent checkbox, then click Acknowledge Policy.
4. A sealed receipt with a receipt code and UTC timestamp appears immediately; the card moves to "Acknowledged" the next time the list loads.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: I published a policy — were employees emailed? No, not currently. Email delivery for both publish notifications and reminders is on hold pending an infrastructure update. Employees find out via their My Policies badge/list. Tell people directly if you need to guarantee awareness right away.

Q: What happens to acknowledgments if I edit the policy's audience after it's published? Nothing changes about what's already on record. Audience edits only affect who is targeted going forward (the live pending list). The historical snapshot of who a published version applied to is fixed forever at the moment it was published.

Q: Can I edit a published version's text to fix a typo? No. Once published, a version's content, file, and fingerprint are permanently sealed — that immutability is what makes the evidence trustworthy. To fix anything, create a new draft version and publish that instead.

Q: What if I set the audience to zero rules? The policy applies to nobody, not everybody. Publishing is blocked until you add at least one rule (use "All Employees" for company-wide coverage), and you can't remove the last rule from an already-published policy.

Q: An employee left the company — do their acknowledgments disappear? No. They drop out of the "pending" count (there's nothing left to chase), but every acknowledgment record they ever made is retained permanently as evidence.

Q: Can HR record an acknowledgment on an employee's behalf (e.g., they signed a paper form)? Not in the current build — every acknowledgment on record today came directly from the employee through ESS. The data model reserves a "Recorded by HR" state for a future manual-entry path.

Q: Why can't the AI assistant answer a question about a policy I know exists? Either the policy doesn't apply to you (the assistant is scoped to your own audience), or that version has no policy text — only an uploaded file — so there's nothing for it to read.

Q: Is my question to the Policy Assistant private? It's sent to your company's configured AI provider along with the relevant policy excerpts, in order to generate an answer — the assistant discloses this up front. Your company must deliberately enable this feature; it's off by default.

Q: Can I un-archive a policy? Not currently — archiving a policy is currently a one-way action in the UI.

Appendix

Status definitions

The evidence guarantees, in plain language

The module's whole design exists to support one sentence: "On this date, this employee acknowledged this exact version of this policy, whose content had this fingerprint, and at the time it was published it applied to this group of people." That's backed by five things baked into the system rather than left to convention:

1. The document is stored, not linked. A published version's file lives inside the database itself, never a shared folder that could be replaced or deleted out from under the record.
2. Acknowledgments can't be altered or deleted. Once created, an acknowledgment row is permanent at the database level — not just "the app doesn't offer a delete button," but genuinely blocked even by a direct database edit.
3. The audience is frozen at publish time. Changing department/location assignments afterward can never retroactively change who a historical version applied to.
4. A "carried forward" acknowledgment is never fabricated. No new acknowledgment record is ever created for an employee who didn't personally act — continuity from an earlier version is calculated on the fly and always shown distinctly from a direct acknowledgment.
5. Published content cannot be edited. Once a version is sealed, its text, file, and fingerprint are locked forever.

Known current limitations

• Publish and reminder notifications do not send actual emails yet (pending an infrastructure/credential update) — see §1.
• No "export evidence package" download exists yet; review evidence on-screen.
• Employee IP address is captured on acknowledgment but not shown or exported anywhere.
• "Recorded by HR" acknowledgments have no entry screen yet, though the badge/state exists for when they do.
• Audience rules pointing at a deleted department/location/employee are silently skipped, without a warning in the UI.
• Automatic text extraction from an uploaded PDF/DOCX doesn't exist — type or paste the policy text directly for it to be searchable or AI-answerable.
• The History tab (a full audit timeline of publishes, audience changes, and reminders) is a placeholder for now.
• Employee Type audience rules require entering a numeric ID rather than picking from a friendly list.
• Archiving a policy cannot currently be undone in the UI.