Passionfruit helps companies answer complex questionnaires at scale, especially in sustainability, quality, and compliance reporting. To do this effectively, it structures its domain around a few core concepts. Understanding these concepts will help you make the most of Passionfruit.

Questionnaires

A Questionnaire is the core unit of work in Passionfruit. It represents a set of questions a company needs to answer—often coming from sustainability frameworks like CDP, CSRD, EcoVadis, or customer-specific audits.

A questionnaire in Passionfruit can be:

  • Created manually
  • Generated based on previous templates
  • An Excel, Word or browser form.

Every questionnaire is uniquely identified and versioned, enabling teams to track changes over time and reuse previous work.

Questions & Answers

Each questionnaire consists of multiple Questions, which can be:

  • Free text questions
  • Multiple-choice questions
  • Tables or matrix-style inputs
  • Numeric fields
  • File uploads or evidence requirements

Answers are stored alongside questions. Passionfruit ensures:

  • All answers are tracked with metadata (who answered, when, and with what evidence)
  • Versioning to maintain historical records
  • Semantic mapping so similar questions can be recognized across questionnaires

Approved Answer Library

Passionfruit maintains an Approved Answer Library. This is a knowledge base of previously vetted answers that can be reused in new questionnaires.

Benefits of the library:

  • Speeds up questionnaire completion
  • Ensures consistency in responses
  • Reduces errors and omissions
  • Stores references to supporting documents (e.g. policies, reports)

Whenever Passionfruit recognizes that a question is similar to a past one, it can suggest an answer from the library for review.

Knowledge base

Many questionnaires require Evidence — documents, spreadsheets, certificates, or policies that substantiate the answers. Passionfruit manages evidence as first-class objects:

  • Stored in dedicated evidence buckets (e.g. S3)
  • Version-controlled to ensure the latest documents are used
  • Linked directly to questions and answers
  • Health-checked for validity, approval status, and expiry dates

Evidence integrity is critical for audits and regulatory compliance.

Workflows

Passionfruit structures the process of completing questionnaires into Workflows, supporting:

  • Drafting and reviewing answers
  • Tagging questions for team members
  • Tracking progress across large questionnaires
  • Managing approval cycles

Workflows help teams collaborate and ensure that complex submissions are completed accurately and on time.

Automation & AI

A major goal of Passionfruit is to reduce the manual work involved in questionnaire answering. It uses AI for:

  • Semantic search: finding similar past questions
  • Answer generation: drafting responses based on past answers and documents
  • Formatting answers into required structures (e.g. tables, free text)
  • Confidence scoring to signal how reliable an auto-suggested answer might be

Even when using AI, Passionfruit keeps humans in the loop. Users always review and approve suggested answers.

Security & Compliance

Given the sensitive nature of sustainability and compliance data, Passionfruit emphasizes:

  • Strict access controls
  • Encrypted storage
  • API auditing and logging
  • Versioning of both data and evidence
  • Alignment with regulatory standards like GDPR, ISO 27001, etc.

Security is integral to Passionfruit’s design.

Passionfruit’s Philosophy

At its core, Passionfruit aims to:

  • Reduce repetitive work by leveraging AI and past data
  • Ensure consistency and quality in compliance reporting
  • Empower teams to collaborate efficiently
  • Maintain auditable records to withstand regulatory scrutiny

By understanding these core concepts, you’ll be ready to navigate Passionfruit and make your compliance processes smoother and faster.