# What is the knowledge base?

The knowledge base is your organisation's source of truth for how you answer
security questionnaire and RFP questions. It holds approved question-and-answer
pairs — [knowledge base items](/knowledge-base/knowledge-base-items/) — that
ResponseHub reuses whenever the same ground comes up again.

Where [sources](/sources/what-are-sources/) are the documents you imported, the
knowledge base is the wording you have decided on.

## Why the knowledge base matters

**It fixes your wording.** Without a knowledge base item, an answer is generated
from your sources afresh each time, so the same question can come back worded
differently on different questionnaires. When you have settled on how a question
should be answered, storing it as a knowledge base item means that exact wording
is what gets used.

**It covers what your policies don't.** Plenty of questionnaire questions cannot
be answered from a policy document, however complete your sources are:

- The named individual responsible for something
- Questions about your product that no policy describes
- Anything you have no formal policy for yet, but still need a consistent answer to

The knowledge base is where those answers live.

**It compounds.** Every answer you approve is available to the next
questionnaire, which is what makes the second questionnaire faster than the
first.

**Where answers come from:** ResponseHub draws on both your knowledge base and your sources. For how it
chooses between them, see
[knowledge base vs sources](/how-questions-are-answered/kb-vs-sources/).

## Building your knowledge base

You can build the knowledge base up in a few ways:

- [Import from a CSV](/knowledge-base/importing-from-csv/) if you already keep
  answers in a spreadsheet
- [Import from completed questionnaires](/knowledge-base/importing-from-completed-questionnaires/)
  to reuse the work in questionnaires you have already completed
- Approve answers as you work through a questionnaire, which
  [feeds them back](/questionnaires/updating-kb-after-questionnaire/) into the
  knowledge base

## Next steps

- [Knowledge base items](/knowledge-base/knowledge-base-items/) — what each item contains
- [Writing and updating](/knowledge-base/writing-and-updating/)
- [Finding duplicates](/knowledge-base/duplicates/)