How to maintain your security questionnaire knowledge base

A well-maintained knowledge base can be a great help in manually responding to security questionnaires. Here's how to keep yours useful as your company and security posture evolve.

Last updated: December 20, 2025

Use Notion, at a minimum

We recommend using Notion over a spreadsheet for your security questionnaire knowledge base. Questionnaire responses tend to be quite text heavy, and spreadsheets make it harder to quickly scan and find what you need.

Notion also has a couple of features that make it particularly well suited:

Automatic timestamps. Notion’s built-in “last updated” and “created” properties update automatically, so you always know how fresh an answer is without manual tracking.
Good search. Notion’s search functionality is significantly better than trying to cmd+f through a spreadsheet, especially when you’re dealing with hundreds of Q&As.

You can find a link to our ultimate security questionnaire knowledge base template to get started.

Review after each questionnaire

After you complete a new security questionnaire, take the time to go through it and add any new questions that came up. Update any existing answers where you’ve noticed things have changed.

This is a hard habit to keep. By the time you finish a questionnaire, you’re so sick of it that you just want to move on to the next thing. But it’s worth taking 20 minutes to do this while the context is still fresh.

Without this discipline, your knowledge base gradually drifts out of sync with reality. Six months later, you’ll be copying answers that no longer reflect how your team actually operates.

Add alternate wording for questions

“Do you encrypt data on your servers and file stores?” and “Do you encrypt data at rest?” are asking essentially the same thing and should have the same response. But unless you’ve recorded alternate phrasings, no amount of cmd+f will help you find the right answer.

Add extra columns to your knowledge base entries for alternate wordings of each question. When you’re doing your post-questionnaire review, note any new phrasings you encountered and add them in.

This small bit of effort compounds over time and makes your knowledge base significantly more searchable.

Include a last updated column

This is a good way to see which answers might be out of date. Especially in tech companies and startups, things change: new products get launched, hosting situations evolve, libraries get swapped out. Answers that were accurate six months ago might not be accurate today.

A “last updated” column gives you visibility into staleness. When you see an answer that hasn’t been touched in a year, you know to double-check it before sending it to a customer.

If you’re using Notion, this can be automated. If you’re using a spreadsheet, you’ll need to update it manually, which is another reason Notion is the better choice.

Include notes

Add a notes column where you can leave comments on a particular question and answer. This is useful in a few situations:

Multiple products. If you have multiple products within your company and a question applies to just one of them, note that. Otherwise someone might give an answer about Product A when the customer is asking about Product B.
Conditional answers. Sometimes an answer only applies in certain contexts. “Only use this response if the customer specifically asks about our enterprise tier” or “This assumes the customer is using our cloud-hosted version, not self-hosted.”
Context for future you. Why did you phrase something a particular way? What was the reasoning behind a specific claim? Notes help you reconstruct the thinking when you’re revisiting an answer months later.

When it makes sense to use a security questionnaire automation tool

All of the above requires fairly significant effort. If you’re doing this on a regular basis, more than once a month, then it makes sense to use a tool like ResponseHub, which includes a knowledge base feature designed specifically for this. There are several ways to approach automation, from basic knowledge bases to specialist AI tools.

With ResponseHub:

New questions are added automatically. After each questionnaire, new Q&As flow into your knowledge base without manual data entry.
Built-in deduplication. The de-duplicator works based on meaning rather than keywords, so it finds similar questions even when phrased differently and gives you the opportunity to rationalize them into a single entry.
Change tracking. All changes are logged so you can see how fresh each answer is.
Semantic search. When ResponseHub searches for knowledge base entries to answer a questionnaire, it uses AI and meaning rather than keywords. So you never have to worry about maintaining alternate question phrasings just to find things later.

The manual approach works fine when you’re getting started. But once security questionnaires start consuming real time, automation pays for itself quickly.

Learn more about security questionnaire automation and how small teams can handle questionnaires efficiently.