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Create your first policy

This walkthrough gets you from a blank tenant to a published policy. You’ll need to be signed in as a Policy Editor, Policy Lead, or Admin (the User role cannot create policies).

1. Open the editor

Section titled “1. Open the editor”

From the top navigation, click Policies. From the policies list, click New Policy in the top-right corner.

You have two ways to start:

  • From scratch — a blank rich-text editor.
  • From a document — upload a PDF, DOCX, or TXT, or paste a URL, and let PolicyBot extract individual policies you can review. That flow is covered separately in The Policy Inbox. For your first policy, start from scratch.

2. Fill in the required fields

Section titled “2. Fill in the required fields”

At minimum, you need:

  • Title — a short, specific name. If you leave it blank, InPolicy will auto-extract a title from the first sentence of the body when you save.
  • Body — the policy text itself. Minimum 10 characters. The editor is rich text (bold, italic, headings, lists, blockquotes, links) — not Markdown. Paste from Google Docs or Word and formatting is preserved.
  • Severity (1–5) — how important this policy is. Severity drives UI color coding in the extension and Mac app and sort order in analytics.
  • Policy Area — the group this policy belongs to. If none exist yet, create one from Settings → Policy Areas.

You can also set:

  • Confidence threshold — how confident PolicyBot needs to be before it flags a violation. The slider shows 0–10; internally this maps to 0.0–1.0. Defaults to 8 (0.8). Higher = fewer but more certain flags.
  • Scope — audience, countries, teams this policy applies to. Leave blank to apply to everyone.
  • Effective date / Expiry date — optional dates. Policies outside their effective window still publish, but the extension and Mac app will not flag violations against them.
  • Rationale — a note to other editors about why this policy exists. Visible to users with the VIEW_POLICY_RATIONALE permission.

3. Save as draft, or publish

Section titled “3. Save as draft, or publish”

Two buttons at the bottom:

  • Save as draft — creates the policy in DRAFT status. Drafts are visible to editors but not to the general User role and are not checked by the extension or Mac app.
  • Publish — creates the policy in PUBLISHED status. Publishing triggers embedding generation (used by violation detection); this runs asynchronously and usually finishes within about 30 seconds.

Who can publish: Only Policy Lead and Admin can publish directly. If you’re a Policy Editor, you’ll see Save as draft only — a Lead or Admin needs to review and publish your draft.

4. Verify

Section titled “4. Verify”

After publishing, you’re redirected to the policy detail view. Check:

  • The status pill reads Published (not Draft).
  • The Severity, Policy Area, and Scope show the values you set.
  • The History tab has an INITIAL and PUBLISHED revision.

Within ~30 seconds the embedding job should complete — now the browser extension and Mac app will flag text that conflicts with this policy.

5. Watch PolicyBot react (optional)

Section titled “5. Watch PolicyBot react (optional)”

If you’ve got the browser extension installed, open a new tab, start writing something that contradicts the policy you just published, and wait a moment. You should see a red underline appear under the matched text. Click it to see the policy card. That’s the end-to-end loop.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”