In one sentence
Read & Acknowledge users are the seat type designed for everyone in your workforce who needs to read SOPs, complete training, and confirm they understood — production operators, technicians, customer-service reps — without paying full-user rates for people who never edit a record.
- They get Documents, Training, and Ask the Library. The sidebar shows four entries — Dashboard, Documents, Training, Ask — and that's the whole surface. No NCRs, no audits, no MOC, no record creation anywhere. But the training surface is the whole thing: internal courses, external LMS completions, document acknowledgements — all on one page.
- Every interaction is audit-logged. Views, acknowledgements, e-signatures, course completions, quiz attempts, and agent queries are all written to the activity timeline. The compliance evidence is automatic.
- They're billed at $3/user/month in blocks of 25. R&A doesn't count toward the full-user cap — your whole headcount can be R&A and you still stay on Starter or Professional. That's how whole-workforce training rollout actually pencils out.
Who it's for
Three patterns we see most often:
Production workers
Line operators, machine operators, technicians, assemblers — the people who execute the procedures the QMS controls. They open the SOP, follow the steps, sign off when they've understood the latest revision. They don't write, edit, or approve anything in the QMS itself.
Training-only users
Anyone who's primarily on the system for assigned training in any of its forms — document acknowledgements with e-signature, internal courses with quizzes and retrain intervals, or external completions pushed from your corporate LMS via xAPI. New hires going through onboarding, anyone in a role that requires periodic re-training (forklift, LOTO, hazmat, GMP refreshers), regulated programs that mandate an external certification record. Whichever shape the training takes, it lands on the same Training surface.
Customer-service / sales
People who occasionally need to look up a controlled customer-facing document — a service procedure, a return policy, a customer-specific SOP — without being involved in QMS operations. Read access is enough.
What R&A users can do
The whole list, grouped by surface:
Documents
| Action | Available |
|---|---|
| View any controlled document they have access to — the same RLS rules that filter the library for full users filter it for R&A users | ✅ |
| Acknowledge documents on their distribution list (with e-signature) | ✅ |
| Search controlled documents they have access to | ✅ |
Training (the whole training stack)
| Action | Available |
|---|---|
| Complete document acknowledgements with e-signature | ✅ |
| Take internal courses — content, quizzes, retrain intervals — see Internal courses | ✅ |
| External / xAPI completions appear in their training records when pushed from your corporate LMS — see External training | ✅ |
| Receive email when training or documents are assigned plus follow-up reminders on the cadence the admin set on the artifact — see Acknowledgement & training reminders | ✅ |
| See their own training history — every completion, acknowledgement, and quiz attempt | ✅ |
Ask the Library
| Action | Available |
|---|---|
| Use Ask the Library (the document agent) | ✅ |
The document agent is a particularly important one for R&A users. They can ask plain-language questions about the SOPs they're allowed to read and get answers grounded in their procedures — without paging a supervisor. "What PPE do I need for Press 4 setup?" gets a citation back to the right SOP section.
What R&A users can't do
Anything else. The sidebar shows four entries — Dashboard, Documents, Training, Ask — and the other modules return a permission error if an R&A user somehow lands on those URLs.
| Action | Available |
|---|---|
| Create / edit / approve documents | ❌ |
| Raise NCRs, audits, MOCs, exemptions, etc. | ❌ |
| Be added to audit teams | ❌ |
| Approve in any workflow | ❌ |
| See module dashboards | ❌ |
| Access Admin | ❌ |
If an R&A user needs any of these, they should be promoted to a Full user. Conversion is one click in Admin → Users, and the seat count updates immediately.
The compliance angle — every action is audit-logged
This is the part that auditors care about. Every R&A user interaction is captured:
- View — "User opened SOP-MX-04 v3.2 at 14:22"
- Acknowledgement — with timestamp, IP, user-agent, and the exact version of the document acknowledged
- E-signature — separate audit entry from the acknowledgement, captured at the same moment
- Internal course completion — date, course version, quiz score, pass/fail
- External / xAPI completion — the statement received from the LMS with the activity ID, date, and (where present) score
- Agent query — the question asked, the documents the agent retrieved, and the answer returned
- Quiz attempt — questions, answers, score, pass/fail
These are queryable from the user's profile → Activity and from Admin → Activity log for the whole org. When the auditor asks "Show me everyone who acknowledged the latest revision of SOP-MX-04", the answer is a filtered list, not a folder dive.
For the document side of the audit trail, see Document training.
Adding R&A users at scale
Because most plants have far more R&A users than full users, the workflow is built for bulk:
- Admin → Users → Bulk add R&A.
- Paste a list of email addresses (or upload a CSV).
- Optionally set a default role group (e.g. Press operators with a pre-built distribution list of relevant SOPs).
- Send invitations.
R&A users complete a minimal setup — name, password (or SSO), language — and land on their My documents page showing what they need to read first.
Each new user uses one R&A seat. R&A seats are billed in blocks of 25 — adding the 26th user automatically purchases a second block at $75/month. The current usage and any pending block purchase are visible at all times in Admin → Billing.
Pricing recap
R&A users are $3/user/month, sold in blocks of 25 ($75/block).
| Tier | R&A included | Add'l block | Add'l block price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 25 | × any number | $75/mo |
| Professional | 100 | × any number | $75/mo |
| Business | 500 | × any number | $75/mo |
R&A seats don't count against the tier's full-user cap. A Professional org can have 30 weighted full users (its cap) and 1,000 R&A users — that's $499 + 36 blocks × $75 = $499 + $2,700 = $3,199/month. Comparable to traditional eQMS spend on full-user rates for ~10 of those people.
The seat-model math is the reason it makes sense to put your whole workforce on the system, not just the QMS team.
SSO and provisioning
R&A users participate in SSO the same way full users do — Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra are both supported. JIT provisioning means the user is created on first SSO login (and a seat is consumed at that moment).
To control which SSO users get R&A vs Full, use Admin → Auth policy → SSO defaults. The most common pattern: any SSO user from your organization domain comes in as R&A by default, with elevation to Full done explicitly by an admin.
See Single Sign-On (SSO) for the broader provisioning picture.
Related
- Pricing & seat model
- Training hub — the surface R&A users land on
- Internal courses — in-system course content + quizzes
- External training — xAPI completions from your LMS
- Document training
- Document Agent — the agent R&A users can call on
- Roles & permissions
- Single Sign-On (SSO)