About assessments
This topic explains what assessments are, how they are used to evaluate entities, and how assessment results appear on entities. It gives a high‑level overview of how assessments run, how they use workflows, and how they generate information that users can review in entity chapters.
Assessments help you understand an entity at a point in time by applying a consistent set of rules and logic. This supports decisions, guides work, and records outcomes in the platform.
You use assessments to:
Evaluate risk
Collect and review information
Apply consistent decision logic
Capture outcomes at key points in time
An entity can have more than one assessment, each evaluating the entity for a different purpose or business context.
How assessments run
Every assessment runs using a predefined workflow. The workflow controls:
The evaluation steps and conditions
The order in which steps run, and which run automatically
When a user review is needed
How the assessment reaches an outcome
As the workflow runs, it follows this defined order. Some steps complete automatically, while others pause the assessment and wait for user input.
To understand how assessments move through these steps in more detail, see About the assessment lifecycle.
About assessment data
Assessments rely on data to evaluate an entity. This data can come from data providers or from information already stored on the entity.
When you search for a company and add it to your portfolio, the entity record is populated with core details from the Entity verification API (EVA), which provides live register data from official commercial registers and financial authorities across many countries.
As an assessment runs, workflow steps can use this existing data and add to it with information from other sources, including external data providers.
Assessments and entity chapters
As an assessment workflow runs, it can generate new information about the entity.
Some workflow steps collect or calculate information about the entity. When these steps run, they add or update chapters on the entity. For example, a screening step adds or updates the Screening events chapter.
Each chapter shows the information identified during the assessment, making it easy to review assessment findings alongside other entity data.
If an assessment is re-evaluated, for example, because underlying data has changed, the workflow may rerun certain steps. When this happens, the related chapters update to reflect the latest findings.
Because an entity can have multiple assessments, different assessments may add or update different chapters.
To learn more about how information is organized on an entity, see About chapters.