# Questionnaire items

Every question in a questionnaire becomes a questionnaire item. The item holds
the question, its answer, who is dealing with it, where the answer came from, and
any discussion your team has had about it.

Open an item by selecting it in the questionnaire's list. Its details open in a
panel beside the list.

## Statuses

| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| **Needs Input** | The item needs a person to complete it. |
| **Auto Answered** | ResponseHub answered it. It still needs human approval. |
| **Approved** | A person has approved the answer. |

An answer can only be edited while the item is **Needs Input** or **Auto
Answered**. Approving locks it — to change an approved answer, set the status
back first.

Change the status with the badge at the top of the panel, or select **Approve**.

## Understanding the question

Questionnaire wording is often terse, and the same control gets asked about in
different ways by different customers. Four things on the item help:

**Explain this** breaks the question down: what it is actually asking, why it
matters, and how it is typically evidenced.

**View in context** shows the question as it appears in the original spreadsheet,
with the rows around it. Useful when a question only makes sense alongside the
one before it — numbered sub-questions, or a heading that sets up everything
beneath it.

**Guidance** shows any notes the customer supplied with the question, where the
questionnaire had a guidance column.

**Comments from spreadsheet** shows any Excel comments attached to the original
cell, which customers sometimes use to add context.

## Applicability

ResponseHub assesses whether a question applies to an organisation like yours,
based on your account profile, and shows **Applicable**, **Not Applicable**, or
**Not Checked**.

Select **View rationale** to see the reasoning. If the assessment is wrong, select
the badge to change it.

## Working as a team

**Assign an item** to whoever should deal with it — select **Unassigned (click to
assign)** at the top of the panel and choose a colleague. Assignment is how you
route questions to the subject matter expert who actually knows the answer.

**Discussion** is where that conversation happens. Leave a comment, reply, and
resolve it once settled. Resolved comments stay available behind **Show
resolved**.

**Copy details** copies the whole item to your clipboard — the question, its
status, the guidance, both parts of the answer, and a link back to the item.
It is the quickest way to ask someone outside ResponseHub for input by email.

## References

The **References** card shows the passages from your knowledge base and sources
that were used, each badged **Used in answer**, or **Used as answer** where the
text was reused word for word. Each carries a **Relevance** rating, and anything
retrieved but not drawn on is listed under **Unused references**.

Where ResponseHub could not find enough relevant material, the card says
**Insufficient Context** and explains what was missing instead of showing a
confidence rating. See [references](/how-questions-are-answered/references/) and
[confidence](/how-questions-are-answered/confidence/).

## Audit history

Every change to an item is recorded. Expand **Audit History** to see what
changed, when, and who changed it.

## Moving between items

Use the <kbd>←</kbd> and <kbd>→</kbd> arrow keys to step through items without
closing the panel, and <kbd>Esc</kbd> to close it. Working through a long
questionnaire this way is faster than returning to the list each time.

The arrow keys move through the items **currently listed on the page**, so they
stop at the end of it rather than carrying on into the next page of results. To
keep going, close the panel, move to the next page, and open an item there. The
same applies to a filtered list — you navigate what is shown, not the whole
questionnaire.

## Deleting items

Delete a single item with the delete icon at the top of its panel, or select
several in the list and use **Delete** in the bar at the bottom of the screen.

**Deleting is always reversible:** Every delete in ResponseHub is a soft delete — nothing is destroyed straight
away. A notification appears immediately after you delete something, with an
**Undo** link that restores it. Once that notification goes, the record can still
be recovered: contact support and they can restore it for you.

## Next steps

- [Answering questions](/questionnaires/answering-questions/) — writing, generating, and approving the answer
- [Completing a questionnaire](/questionnaires/completing-a-questionnaire/)