Getting started
A brand-new SolveGRC workspace starts empty, and an empty GRC platform can feel like a locked room: where do you begin, and how much do you have to feed it before it gives you something real back? This page answers both questions honestly. The short version: pick a goal, follow the journey the dashboard builds for you. Most goals take a handful of steps, and the dashboard shows which one comes next.
Pick your goal
Until someone picks a goal, organization administrators see one question on the dashboard: What brings you to SolveGRC? Other members see the Just exploring journey in the meantime. The dashboard offers six goals:
- Get compliant with a framework — SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI, CIS, and more.
- Manage vendor risk — onboard, assess, and continuously monitor vendors.
- Answer security questionnaires — AI-drafted, cited answers from your own documents.
- See my cloud security posture — connect AWS, Azure, or GCP read-only.
- Build continuity & DR readiness — map services, impacts, and plans.
- Just exploring — a general tour of the foundations.
Your answer picks the journey the dashboard walks you through. It is stored on the workspace and visible to your whole team. While the journey card is showing, an administrator can change the goal with the pencil next to the journey title. The card retires once every step is done.
Follow the journey
The journey card on the dashboard lists the handful of steps between an empty workspace and your goal's first real insight. It is not a static checklist: every step is checked against your actual data, so finishing work anywhere in the product ticks the step — the card never nags you for something you have already done.
Every unfinished step has a button that takes you to the right page. The next unfinished step also says why it matters and what it unlocks, and many steps offer Show me how, which opens an interactive walkthrough on the page the step points to.
How much data is enough?
This is the question every new tenant asks, so SolveGRC answers it on the dashboard rather than leaving you to guess. The Insight readiness panel lists the platform's headline insights and, for each one that is not lit yet, the single next input it is waiting on:
| Insight | Becomes meaningful when |
|---|---|
| Compliance score | A framework is active and you have assessed your first controls |
| Vendor risk ratings | A vendor exists and a vendor risk assessment has been scored |
| AI questionnaire answers | Three documents are uploaded and a questionnaire is imported |
| Cloud posture | A cloud account is connected and a sync has returned at least one finding |
| Risk in dollars | A risk exists and a business service carries dollar impacts |
| Continuity readiness | A business service is mapped with its dependencies |
Two honest rules of thumb follow from that table:
Cloud posture is the quickest win: one read-only connection, and the first sync returns findings with no other data required. If your provider's security service is on (AWS Security Hub, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, or Google Security Command Center), the findings arrive mapped to compliance standards. Questionnaires is a close second: upload three to five core documents (your security policy, a SOC 2 report, prior questionnaires) and the AI can start drafting cited answers once they finish processing.
The AI features draw on your document corpus. They work with a thin corpus — they will just tell you honestly when the evidence does not cover a question. More relevant documents give the AI more to cite.
Where things flow
Nothing you enter lives in only one place. Documents become citable evidence; evidence backs controls; controls roll up to framework scores; failing cloud findings open findings on the controls they map to and can raise risk signals; approved questionnaire answers become evidence. The How SolveGRC fits together page draws the full map, and most core module pages have a Connections button in their header showing the same thing for the page you are on: what it consumes, what it produces, and what it feeds. For step-by-step paths across modules, see Workflows.
When something is empty
Many empty views explain what fills them and offer the action that does, often with a walkthrough. The AI assistant in the bottom-right corner can also answer "how do I…" questions with citations into these docs and the in-app walkthroughs.