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Administrators interested in learning more about solution updates.

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We're excited to introduce our latest release – one that makes your reports richer and faster to build. New ready-made report blocks cover the content your assessment and quality risk reports need most. You can now brand reports with your firm’s logos from a new Assets library, and report on exactly what each assessment covered using its Scope. Alongside this, you can upload assessment reports written outside the product, choose your own inactivity timeout, request reviews in bulk, and see list guidance right where you need it.

The article outlines the new features and improvements in the Ideagen Audit Quality v2.8 release, available from 22 October 2026.

Version 2.8.1

Fixes

This hotfix release fixes for a permissions error:

• Permissions: Fixed an issue where users could perform actions in one instance (for example, Production) using permissions granted by a group they belong to in another instance of the same tenant (for example, Training or UAT).

Version 2.8.0

Features

New ready-made report blocks

The Report Designer's Blocks toolbox now offers a new set of blocks. Each one drops in with its data, layout, and sorting already set up, so the evidence you've recorded flows straight into your report. Block names follow your firm's own terminology.

For assessment reports:

• Overdue Remedial Actions Table: lists every open remedial action that has passed its due date, most overdue first, with owner, due date and colour-coded priority. It's ideal for monitoring and follow-up reporting.
• Findings by Severity Summary: groups your findings under each severity band, most serious first, so readers see the biggest issues straight away.
• Findings by Deficiency Summary: presents each deficiency with its linked findings grouped beneath it, so your report shows how individual findings roll up into deficiencies in your system of quality management, rather than presenting a flat list. This block appears when Deficiencies are switched on in your system settings.

For quality risk and register reports:

• Quality Risk Table: lists every quality risk in a register with its type, owner, and inherent and target rating bands, sorted with your highest-rated risks first.
• Quality Risk Assessment Summary: shows a quality risk's inherent and target assessments side by side, giving a clear before-and-after view.
• Quality Risks and Responses Summaries: list each quality risk with the quality responses designed to address it, so you can show that every quality risk has been responded to.
• Quality Response Assessment Table: compares each quality response's latest actual result against its target, to show whether responses are operating as intended.
• Assurance Tables for Quality Risks and Quality Responses: present the latest assurance with its owner, who completed it and when, and its colour-coded outcome. They give your reports clear monitoring evidence.

Each block follows your system settings, so residual and target assessments stay hidden if you've switched them off. The quality response blocks are offered when you're working within a quality response data block in your report.

Brand your reports with your firm’s images

Your logos and images can now appear in your reports. A new Image element in the Report Designer lets you place an image anywhere in the body of a report page. Choose it from your firm's library, set its alignment and size, and it will appear in both your Word and PDF output.

Images come from the new Assets screen in Administration: one central place for your firm's logos and other reusable files. Drag and drop to upload, archive assets you no longer need, and keep everything consistent across every template. Anyone who builds report templates can pick from the full library. Uploading and managing assets is controlled by four new permissions, so you decide who can create, edit, archive, and delete them. If an image is later removed, your reports will still generate, with a clear note where the image used to be.

Report on your assessment scope

Your assessment's Scope can now flow straight into reports and queries. The locations and service lines an assessment covers, along with their ratings, risk banding, and scores, are now available as a data source for assessment report templates. Your report will always state exactly what the assessment covered, with no retyping and no risk of drifting out of step with the record.

New Scope data sources start with location, service line, and rating, sorted by location. You can filter out excluded scope items so they never appear in your report. Scope is also available as a sub-query beneath assessments in the Query Designer, ready for your own extracts and analysis.

Upload your own assessment reports

Assessment reports written outside the product now have a proper home. The Assessment Reports register has the same familiar drag-and-drop upload area as attachments, so you can add a finished report straight into the register alongside the ones you generate. Preview, download, set as primary, and delete all work exactly as they do for generated reports. The primary report banner now shows the correct icon for the file type, whether that's a PDF, an image, or an Office document.

If an upload doesn't finish, for example because the tab was closed partway through, it no longer appears in your list as though it were complete. Instead, it's shown separately as a failed upload that you can tidy away.

Attachments are easier to scan, too. Every Attachments tab now shows files and links in two separate sections, each with its own count, so you can go straight to the evidence you're looking for.

Choose your own inactivity timeout

Previously, the product always signed users out after 15 minutes of inactivity. This was too short for detailed review work and, for some firms, didn't align with their security policy. Administrators can now choose the period that suits them. Go to System Settings and, in the Authorization section, select an Inactivity timeout of 15, 30, 60, 90, or 120 minutes.

Users still receive a warning and a minute to respond before being signed out, and activity in any tab keeps every tab alive. The timeout remains at 15 minutes until you choose to change it, and any changes are recorded in your audit trail like every other system setting.

Request reviews in bulk

You can now use Request Review as a bulk action on the Assessment Execution, Methodology, Findings, and Deficiencies grids. Select the items you want reviewed, choose a due date and a reviewer once, and a review is requested for every item in one go — there's no need to open each record in turn. The due date is suggested automatically based on your assessment type's review period, and you'll be told clearly if any items couldn't be sent for review, along with the reason why. Reviewing in bulk makes it easier to evidence timely review of work across an assessment.

List guidance on every record

The guidance your administrators write for list values, such as what a particular severity means compared with the next one down, was previously only visible while creating or editing a record. Now, an info icon sits beside list fields on saved records too. Select it to see every value in the list with its description, so you can interpret a record correctly without asking anyone. It covers severity, resolution, priority, category, test result, and risk line fields across actions, findings, problems, incidents, audit tests, and risks.

Administrators can also now mark which test results mean a test has failed, using a new Indicates a failed test option in Lists. This records the meaning of each result now; it doesn't change how tests behave today.

A clearer pre-opening checklist

The checklist shown on a draft assessment's home page has been redesigned to be compact and easy to scan. Details, Key Dates, Scope, and Team each have their own panel showing status at a glance: Done, Needs attention, or Worth a review. Each panel includes a summary of what needs doing, guidance on why it matters, and a link straight to the right place. Summary counts at the top show how ready your assessment is before you open it.

The Key Dates grid now shows the day of the week alongside each date, for example, "Thursday 30 Oct 2025", so you can plan around working days at a glance.

Filter, find, and see more

Filter quality risks by perspective, source and effect. Risk Perspective, Risk Source, and Risk Effect are now available as filters on the quality risk register, in Views, and in the Query Designer. Risk Perspective is also available for quality risks within assessments and on assessment history. A quality risk with several values is found when you filter by any one of them.

See where assessment content came from. Library columns are now available for quality objectives, quality risks, quality responses, and tests within an assessment, and the Library Test column is back for tests. You can see at a glance which items were drawn from your library.

Smarter date filters. Date range filters now let you choose equal to, before, after, on or before, or on or after, and show a single, simpler calendar. A quick Past option on the action Due Date filter finds overdue remedial actions in one click.

More detail where it matters. Heat map summary cards now show which matrix you're looking at when a card holds more than one, and hovering over a cell shows its rating. Query results now show the time each result was created as well as the date. Custom field settings show the maximum length of each text field type, so administrators can plan how fields will be used.

Behind the scenes

We've introduced a shared caching layer that cuts down repeated work behind the scenes, such as looking up users, permissions, and custom field settings. This reduces load across the platform and helps keep pages responsive as your data grows.

Fixes

This release includes a number of fixes covering reliability and accuracy across the product:

• Reporting and queries: Fixed relative date filters such as "Today" or "Last 7 days" failing on date-only fields. Fixed stray asterisks appearing in generated remedial action tables. Fixed duplicated color options when formatting report tables.
• Assessments and results: Fixed a save error, and a page that stayed on loading, when adding a quality response result without an assessment method. The option to add one is now hidden until a method is set. Fixed status icons on the Assessment Execution grid appearing off-center.
• Configuration: Fixed being unable to save a masthead layout with no fields. Fixed an unnecessary alert after saving a new custom list. Fixed URL fields accepting badly formed web addresses. Fixed misaligned color swatches in the color picker.
• Audit trail: Fixed an unexpected error when sorting the audit trail on sites with older, incomplete history entries.
• Notifications: Fixed tagged users occasionally not receiving notification emails when several people were tagged.
• Views: Fixed the Library column being unavailable for quality objective, quality risk, quality response, and test Views within assessments, and restored the Library Test column for tests.