Maintain

Experts & Reviews Cycles

Name the expert. Set the review cycle. SOPs stay current on their own.

Assign a subject-matter expert as the owner of every card or playbook and set a review date. When the date arrives, Whale creates a review assignment for the right person so processes never quietly rot.
Trusted by 5K+ teams of all sizes
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4.8/5 (180+ reviews)

Can you just show me how to do that again?

Our training is just... a folder of PDFs.

SOPs go stale and nobody notices until they are already wrong

You already have people who own each process. Every card and playbook gets a named owner and a scheduled review, and Whale tracks the date, pings the expert, and logs the verification.

I already explained this 3 times this week.

I don't know... Sarah used to do that.

How teams do it today

SOPs written two years ago nobody has touched since

No single person owns whether a process is correct

Teams stop trusting the library and go back to asking

Audits and onboarding surface outdated steps the hard way

With Whale's

Experts & Reviews Cycles

Every SOP has a review date and the next one is scheduled

A named expert owns every card and playbook

The library stays current, so the team actually uses it

Outdated content gets caught on a cadence, not in an audit

Assign the expert who actually knows the process

Pick a subject-matter expert and make them the owner of any card or playbook. The owner is the person responsible for keeping the content accurate. Their name shows on the document, so readers know who to ask, and Whale routes every review assignment to that person by default.
A digital interface displays a to-do list titled "Hi, Peggy." Items include Welcome to Acme, Prospecting Process, Salesforce CRM, and Sales Training Quiz. A "Sales Expert" badge is shown with an arrow pointing to it—essential parts of the onboarding process.
A pop-up window displaying expert and privacy settings with a highlighted field for selecting an expert named "Joan Harris" and setting a review interval to "Every year." Ideal for process documentation during employee training.

Set the review date and let Whale handle the chase

Choose a review frequency on any card or playbook. Monthly, quarterly, twice a year, annually, or a custom interval. When the date arrives, Whale creates a review assignment for the owner, sends the reminder, and logs the verification once the expert confirms. No spreadsheet, no recurring calendar invite, no one quietly forgetting.

Owners, reviews, and the whole Whale platform work together

A reviewed card feeds Alice, Whale’s AI assistant, so the answers your team gets are always from current content. CoPilot surfaces the same verified card inside the tool where the process runs. Analytics flag cards nobody reviewed and cards nobody reads, so the library gets tighter over time.
Whale assigned user analytics

How it works

Name the owner

Open any card or playbook and assign a subject-matter expert as the owner. Their name shows on the document and they become the default reviewer for every cycle.

Set the review cycle

Pick a review frequency. Whale schedules the next review date and tracks it in the background. You can change the cadence per card or per playbook.

Whale runs the review

When the date arrives, the owner gets a review assignment in their inbox. They confirm the content is current, edit what changed, and Whale logs the verification with a timestamp.

Trusted by 5K+ teams of all sizes

|

4.8/5 (180+ reviews)

Loved for its overall simplicity and support

Frequently Asked Questions

A subject-matter expert is the person you name as the owner of a card or playbook. Open any card or playbook, go to the details panel, and assign an owner from your workspace. Their name shows on the document so readers know who to ask, and Whale routes every review assignment to that person by default. You can reassign the owner at any time, and you can assign different experts to different playbooks inside the same board. Most teams run this by department. Ops owns the ops playbook, finance owns the finance playbook, the hiring manager owns the role-specific onboarding cards. On larger libraries, experts become the single source of accountability for keeping content accurate.
Pick a review frequency on any card or playbook. Monthly, quarterly, twice a year, annually, or a custom interval. Whale stores the next review date and watches it in the background. When the date arrives, Whale creates a review assignment for the owner and sends the reminder. The owner opens the card, confirms the content is still accurate, edits anything that changed, and marks the review complete. Whale logs the verification with a timestamp and schedules the next review date automatically based on the cadence you set. If the owner leaves the company or changes role, you reassign the owner and the cycle continues.
The review assignment stays in the owner’s inbox until it is completed, and the card is flagged as overdue for review. Admins see overdue reviews in the analytics dashboard, filtered by team, owner, or playbook. You can reassign the review to another expert, extend the date, or escalate to a manager. Overdue cards are not hidden from readers, but the status signals to the team that the content has not been verified on schedule. Most teams use the overdue flag as a prompt to talk to the owner rather than a hard block.
Yes. Set a review cycle at the playbook level and the owner reviews the playbook as a single unit. That is usually the right cadence for process areas that move together, like a quarterly review of the hiring playbook or the client-onboarding playbook. For cards that change on different rhythms, set the cycle at the card level. You can mix both. A playbook-level annual review plus card-level quarterly reviews on the two or three cards that change most often.
Review cycles are included on the Scale plan and above. The Scale plan also bundles Alice, Whale’s AI assistant, analytics, version history, custom roles, training flows, Slack integration, and PDF export. Owner assignment is available on all paid plans, so any team can name an expert per card or playbook. Scheduled review cycles with automated assignments and verification logging are the Scale feature.
Scribe is a capture tool. It has no concept of an owner, a review date, or a verification log, because it is not built to be a living knowledge base. Trainual supports content owners and review reminders, but the reviews sit inside a training-first product, separated from search and from an AI assistant that can answer questions on the reviewed content. In Whale, the owner you name is the same person Alice, Whale’s AI assistant, points readers to, the same expert whose verified card CoPilot surfaces inside other tools, and the same owner whose review history shows in analytics. One owner, one review cycle, one source of truth across documentation, training, and day-to-day answers.

Other features

Version History

See who changed what, when, and roll it back in one click.

Comments

Discuss and improve documentation in threaded conversations, right where the content lives.

Analytics & Reporting

See who is trained, who is not, and where the gaps are.