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Used by trainings

The Used by trainings summary at the bottom of a document's detail page shows which training materials rely on the document as a source. This is the link that ties a document to the training content, and ultimately the training evidence, that was built on it. It is usually the first thing an auditor wants to see.

Who this is for

Administrators and quality owners tracing the impact of a document.

The detail page answers two different questions about training dependencies, and both open the same impact drawer so the page never becomes a wall of near-identical rows.

The whole document. The Used by trainings summary at the bottom of the page states how many trainings depend on the document across any revision. This is the roll-up to check before making a whole document obsolete, because a training still anchored to an older revision only shows up here. Select it to open the impact drawer.

A single revision. Expanding a revision card in the version history shows a compact summary of the trainings that cite that revision (or one of its translations). This is the view for impact analysis after a change, and it is where the Revalidate action lives. Select it to open the same drawer, scoped to that revision.

Inside the drawer​

The drawer groups the links by training, so each training appears once even when several of its versions or language translations all cite the document. For each training you see:

  • The training name, which opens the training.
  • An Active badge when one of its versions is currently live.
  • A to revalidate signal when one of its citations was invalidated by a document change.
  • A count of how many of its versions reference the document. Expand a training to see the breakdown. Each entry shows the training version (such as v1.0 or v1.0-en), whether it is active, and the document version it is anchored to. An invalidated citation also carries the Revalidate action for Quality Admins.

The number next to Used by trainings counts the trainings that reference the document, not the number of individual version links.

Screenshot pendingUsed by trainings drawer, one row per training, expanded to show version sub-rows and one marked to revalidate

When no training references the document yet, the summary tells you so and points you to link it as a source from a training's Sources step.

How a document anchors training content​

When an author builds a training, they select effective controlled documents as sources. Better Comply records the link to the exact document version that was the source, not just the document. That per-version link is what makes the dependency traceable: the training evidence can always be traced back to the specific version of the document it was built on.

To attach documents as sources, see the Training materials and authoring area.

The out-of-date signal​

A training is marked outdated when the document version it cites is no longer the document's current version. For example, the document moved from v1.0 to v1.1 but a training is still anchored to v1.0.

This is a prompt to review, not an automatic change. When a new document version becomes effective, the trainings citing the prior version are invalidated: they cannot be used for new campaigns and a review task opens for the Quality team. A Quality Admin then decides, either directly from the revision card's Revalidate action or from the Quality review queue: the change was cosmetic, the training was re-checked and remains valid, or the change is significant and people must be re-certified. The training keeps citing the version it was approved against until someone deliberately updates and re-approves it; the decision itself is recorded with a mandatory reason, and the person who created the training version cannot make it.

Why the link is to a version, not just a document

Anchoring training to a specific document version preserves traceability. If the document is later revised, the older training evidence still points at the exact version it relied on, and the outdated badge surfaces the gap so you can decide whether the training needs to be refreshed.

Why this matters for deletion​

Because trainings depend on specific document versions, a document that any training references cannot be deleted. Removing it would break the traceability between the training evidence and its source. Such a document must be made obsolete instead. See Deleting documents and the obsolete action in Lifecycle and approval.