Per-Document Compliance Dashboard (Pro)
Per-Document Compliance Dashboard (Pro)
This feature requires the Dantian Policy Management Pro add-on.
The Free plugin provides the site-wide Compliance Overview. The Pro add-on adds a Document Compliance dashboard that lists every published document with its governance metadata, review status and acknowledgement rate, plus a per-role breakdown, bulk editing, evidence-pack export and a scheduled compliance report email.
The Pro features on this page need an active Pro licence. If your licence is not active, the Document Compliance (and Calendar) menu items stay visible but open a This is a Pro feature page with an Activate your licence button instead of the dashboard. Scheduled compliance reports also stop being sent until the licence is active again.
Accessing the per-document dashboard
Go to Policy Management → Document Compliance in the WordPress admin. You need the Manage settings capability (administrators have it by default) to open this screen.
At the top of the screen you’ll find shortcuts to Compliance Settings and the Acknowledgements Dashboard, and two tabs:
- By Document — the main table of documents (the default view)
- By Role — acknowledgement compliance rates per WordPress role
What the per-document dashboard shows
Summary cards and document table
The By Document tab opens with four summary cards — Total Documents, Overdue, Due Within 30 Days and Unclassified. When you have filters applied, the cards reflect the filtered list rather than all published documents.
Below the cards, the table shows one row per document with these columns:
- Document — the document title
- Owner — the assigned document owner
- Review Cycle and Next Review — the review schedule. If no review date is set, click Set Review Date to set one inline without leaving the dashboard.
- Compliance — the review status: Overdue (review date has passed), Due Soon (review due within 30 days), Current, or No Date
- Status — Active, Superseded or Archived
- Classification — Public, Internal Use, Confidential, Restricted, or Unclassified
- Ack. Required — whether acknowledgement is switched on for the document
- Ack. Rate — how many of the document’s audience have acknowledged the current version (for example “12 of 15 audience members have acknowledged”). Each document is measured against its own audience, so this differs from the single overall figure on the Compliance Overview.
- Frameworks — the regulatory frameworks the document is mapped to (shown only when Regulatory Frameworks is enabled)
- Version History — see below
Use Search Documents to find a document by title.
Role-based compliance breakdown
Open the By Role tab to see a Compliance by Role table. For each WordPress role that is targeted by at least one acknowledgement-required document, it shows:
- Acknowledged — acknowledgements completed by that role’s current members
- Required — acknowledgements required from that role’s current members
- Rate and Progress — the compliance percentage, with a progress bar
Roles are listed worst-first, so the roles needing follow-up appear at the top. Roles with no required documents are left out. If the table is empty, publish a document with Require Acknowledgement switched on and an audience role assigned, and the view will populate.
This breakdown is useful for targeted follow-up: instead of reminding everyone, you can see which roles are lagging and direct your communications accordingly.
Version history expansion
In the Version History column, click View history to expand a list of the document’s versions, newest first, each with its version number, date and change note.
Overdue and expiring filters
Use the filter bar above the table to narrow the list by:
- Owner
- Document type
- Regulatory framework
- Document status — Active, Superseded, Archived or Pending Approval
- Compliance — Overdue, Due Soon, Current or No Date
- Classification — Unclassified, Public, Internal Use, Confidential or Restricted
- Review date range — a from/to date
Click Filter to apply, or Clear filters to reset. To see the individual staff members who still need to acknowledge a document, use the Acknowledgements screen or the exception list in an evidence pack (below).
Bulk governance edit
To change several documents at once:
- Tick the documents in the By Document table.
- Choose Bulk Edit from the bulk actions menu and apply it.
- In the Bulk Edit Selected Documents panel, set any of the following (anything left as — No Change — or blank is left untouched):
- Document Owner
- Review Cycle (days)
- Next Review Date
- Document Status — Active, Superseded or Archived
- Acknowledgement Required — Yes or No
- Audience (Visibility Roles) — select roles to restrict visibility; select none to keep the current audience
- Confidentiality — Public, Internal Use, Confidential, Restricted, or Unclassified (removes the stamp). Note that Public also allows open, logged-out access.
- Record owner sign-off (reviewed & current) — marks each selected document as reviewed and current without re-issuing it for acknowledgement. This is handy for baselining existing policies when you first adopt the plugin. Sign-off is only recorded for documents you are entitled to sign off.
- Click Apply Changes.
Only documents you have permission to edit are updated. This is useful when an organisational restructure means several documents need new owners or revised audiences at the same time.
Evidence pack export
The Evidence Pack generator produces a single ZIP file to hand to an auditor. Open it from Policy Management → Tools → Evidence Pack.
Choose what to include:
- Period start and Period end — only acknowledgements recorded within this range are included. The start defaults to the last 90 days.
- Campaign filter — optionally pick an acknowledgement campaign; this overrides the document selection with every document in that campaign.
- Documents — all acknowledgement-required documents are pre-selected; hold Cmd/Ctrl to deselect. A pack can cover up to 50 documents.
- Pack contents — choose whether to include the per-version document PDFs and the exception list.
Click Generate evidence pack. The ZIP contains:
- A compliance attestation export, as both a CSV and a PDF
- A PDF of each covered document version, each carrying its SHA-256 content hash (optional)
- Per-document acknowledgement logs
- An exception list per document — audience members who have not acknowledged (optional)
- A manifest with a master integrity signature and instructions for verifying it
A pack is limited to 50 documents and 5,000 acknowledgement rows in total. If your selection exceeds either limit, narrow the date range or the document set. The server needs the PHP ZipArchive extension to build packs.
Scheduled compliance digest emails
The Pro add-on can email a compliance summary to nominated managers or administrators on a weekly or monthly schedule.
The report summarises:
- Overdue document reviews
- Pending version approvals
- Acknowledgements expiring in the next 30 days
- Users with outstanding acknowledgements
It also includes Open Compliance Dashboard and View Acknowledgements buttons.
Configuring digest emails:
Go to Policy Management → Settings → Acknowledgements & Notifications, and find these fields in the Reminders & Schedules section:
- Scheduled Compliance Report — Disabled (default), Weekly (Monday) or Monthly (1st).
- Report Recipients — the email addresses that should receive the report, one per line.
You can customise the email’s subject line under Compliance Digest Report in the email templates on the same tab.
Digest emails are sent via WordPress’s standard email system, using the sender name and address from your plugin settings. Make sure your site has outbound email configured correctly (a transactional email plugin is recommended).
| Setting | Default | Allowed values |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled Compliance Report | Disabled | Disabled, Weekly (Monday), Monthly (1st) |
| Report Recipients | Empty (no report is sent) | Email addresses, one per line (commas also work) |
When the report is sent:
- Once a day, early in the morning (around 6:30 am in your site’s timezone), the plugin checks whether today is a report day — a Monday for the weekly report, or the 1st of the month for the monthly report — and sends the report if it is.
- Each report is sent only once per week or month, even if the background check runs more than once. If sending fails, it is tried again at the next check.
- Each recipient receives their own copy. The default subject is your site name in brackets followed by Weekly Compliance Report or Monthly Compliance Report.
- Background tasks rely on WP-Cron, which runs when someone visits your site. On a quiet site the report can arrive later in the day.
Troubleshooting the compliance dashboard
The Document Compliance menu shows “This is a Pro feature”. Your Pro licence is not active. Click Activate your licence, or go to Policy Management → Settings → Licence.
I can’t open Document Compliance at all. The screen needs the Manage settings permission. Policy Auditors and Editors don’t have it by default.
The By Role tab is empty. No published document has Require Acknowledgement switched on with an audience role assigned.
The Frameworks column and framework filter are missing. Switch on Enable Regulatory Frameworks under Settings → Features.
Bulk Edit skipped some documents. Only documents you are allowed to edit are changed, and owner sign-off is only recorded for documents you are entitled to sign off.
The evidence pack won’t generate. Check that your selection is within 50 documents and 5,000 acknowledgement rows, and ask your host to confirm the PHP ZipArchive extension is installed. Generating a pack needs permission to manage acknowledgements.
The scheduled report never arrives. Check that Report Recipients is filled in, that today is a report day, that WordPress can send email (send a test from your SMTP plugin), and that WP-Cron is running.
Worked example: preparing for a quarterly governance meeting
Priya is the compliance lead at a 120-person aged-care provider. Before each quarterly board meeting she needs to report on policy health.
- A month earlier she set Scheduled Compliance Report to Monthly (1st) with herself and the CEO as Report Recipients. On the 1st, both receive a report showing 4 overdue reviews and 9 staff with outstanding acknowledgements.
- She opens Policy Management → Document Compliance, sets the Compliance filter to Overdue and clicks Filter. Four documents appear, all owned by a manager who has since left.
- She ticks all four, chooses Bulk Edit, sets Document Owner to the new Operations Manager and Next Review Date to the end of next month, and clicks Apply Changes.
- On the By Role tab she sees that the night-shift carer role is at 71% while every other role is above 95%, so she targets her follow-up at the night-shift team rather than emailing everyone.
- The day before the meeting she goes to Tools → Evidence Pack, sets the period to the last 90 days, keeps the exception list ticked, and generates the pack. She attaches the attestation PDF to the board papers and keeps the ZIP for the auditor.