Reviewing a Report Before It Goes Out

QA in Pental is a review of the report as it stands, done inside the platform, on the same fields that produce the document. It is not a checklist somebody signs at the end. This guide covers the whole of it: getting work into review, doing the review, what each action means, and the round trip through Word for a reviewer who would rather work in the document.

If your firm does not run a QA step, switch the module off in Settings. The lifecycle then goes straight from completed to ready to deliver, with no approval waiting for anybody.

Getting a report into review

A lead submits the engagement for QA. That moves it into the queue, where it is visible to everybody who can review, sorted into exactly one of five places so a report is never in two lists at once: reports waiting for a reviewer, reports somebody is reviewing, reports being revised by their lead, reports with somebody else, and reports that are done.

Every waiting report offers two things. Take it on puts your name against it so colleagues can see who has it. Review it just opens it. Assigning is for organising, not for permission: anybody who can edit can review, including on their own work, and the screen tells you plainly whose report you are looking at.

The review screen

The report is laid out in tabs that match what the document contains: Findings, Executive Summary, each written area your firm uses such as Notes, Scope, Caveats and Retest Summary, Appendices, and a Checklist. Custom areas you have added appear as their own tabs under whatever you named them.

Above them sit the numbers: how many findings, how many suggestions are waiting on somebody, how many have been accepted, and how many comment threads are still open. Suggestions and comments are counted separately because resolving a remark is not the same as deciding a change.

The bar carries a filter, a search, and Next, which walks you through everything still waiting on somebody, switching tabs when it runs out on the one you are looking at.

Three things you can do to a field

Every field in every section offers the same three actions, which is the whole vocabulary of the review:

Suggest change and Apply now are both under Edit, which opens the field in place: the value becomes the editor, and the comments beside it stay where they are. A box under the editor takes a reason, which travels with the suggestion.

Commenting on the exact words

Select a passage in a field and click Comment, and the comment is anchored to that passage: the words are marked in the text and the comment card sits beside them in the margin, the way Word does it. Selecting nothing comments on the field as a whole, and the box tells you which you are about to do.

Selection works while you are editing as well, so a reviewer who has opened a field to fix one sentence can still leave a remark about another.

A comment can be replied to, resolved, reopened and edited. A thread and its replies are one comment throughout: resolving the thread resolves the replies with it, replying to a resolved thread reopens it, and the count says one, not four.

What the colours mean

One meaning per colour, everywhere on the screen:

• Blue is a remark. Somebody has said something about this.
• Amber is waiting on a decision. A suggestion nobody has accepted or rejected yet.
• Red and green are the words themselves: what went, and what arrived.

A change is shown as the words that actually moved, with the untouched middle of a long field folded away and openable. A change to a URL or a hostname is compared character by character rather than word by word, so three changed characters do not strike out the whole address.

Deciding

A suggestion can be accepted, which writes it, or rejected, which does not. Accept all and Reject all deal with everything waiting in one go.

Both are reversible. An accepted change offers Put it back, which restores the previous wording and marks the change rejected, warning you first if the field has been edited since it was accepted. A rejected change offers Reopen, which puts it back on the list to decide again without touching the text.

Evidence is compared and read on the review screen but cannot be accepted as a change, because the entry holds a flattened reading of the blocks and writing it back would replace your screenshots with a sentence. Evidence is edited in the finding itself.

Two people reviewing at once

Nothing in the platform stops two people working on one report, and the review screen is built for it. You can see who else has the report open and which field they are in, live. If somebody else is already editing the field you open, it says so.

When two people save the same record, only the fields you actually changed are written, so two reviewers working on different fields of the same finding never collide. If you both changed the same field, your save stops and shows you both versions side by side, with the choice of keeping yours or taking theirs. Nothing is overwritten without somebody deciding.

Reviewing in Word instead

A reviewer who would rather work in the document downloads it from the review screen, and the review travels with it. Suggestions arrive as real tracked changes, authored and dated. Comments arrive as real Word comments, anchored to the words they were written about rather than dropped at the top of a section.

That works on the report you generated and on a report somebody has already edited and uploaded, because whichever file Download hands back is the one somebody is about to open. There is also a clean copy, without the review, which is what you use when producing the PDF for the client.

Edits made in Word come back the other way: upload the edited document, and every difference is listed for you to tick or ignore before anything is written, including comments Word added and tracked changes nobody has accepted yet. An unaccepted tracked change in the document arrives as a suggestion in the review rather than being applied.

Finishing

Finish QA sends the report back to the tester, or approves it, and the checklist is the gate: every item your firm has configured, including any custom finding fields, must be satisfied. That checklist is the same list the submission is checked against, so it cannot disagree with itself.

An approval can be undone. Reopening a signed-off report puts it back in review without touching anything in the review itself, and is refused on a report already delivered, where the answer is to deliver a new version rather than reopen the old one.