SaaS Quickstart

This guide walks you from sign-up to your first signed-off evidence entry in the Ankos web app. For the free CLI-only path, see the CLI quickstart.

1. Sign up

Go to app.ankos.dev/auth/register and create an account. You'll land on the onboarding wizard immediately after sign-in.

2. Answer six questions

The onboarding wizard asks about your entity type, payment flow, where your infrastructure runs, your target assessment date, and two owner emails. Ankos uses your answers to scope the ledger for your specific company.

Expected time: about 2 minutes. You can skip any question and adjust later.

See The Onboarding Wizard for what each answer changes.

3. Review your cycle

After the wizard, you'll land on your completion screen showing:

• In-scope entries — the requirements you need to provide evidence for
• N/A entries — items automatically scoped out based on your answers, with a justification attached
• Assigned entries — ledger items pre-assigned to the owners you named
• Top 3 priorities — personalized starting points based on your urgency and infrastructure

From here, click through to the ledger.

4. Collect evidence

You have three sources of evidence:

• Automated scan — install the CLI and run ankos scan --upload to auto-populate evidence for the roughly-half of entries the CLI covers (IAM, KMS, CloudTrail, VPC, and more).
• Manual upload — open any entry and drag in a PDF, screenshot, or document. Every entry includes plain-English guidance on what the QSA expects.
• Carry-forward — if this isn't your first cycle, eligible evidence from the previous cycle can be carried forward with an attestation.

See Evidence sources for details.

5. Sign off

Once an entry has evidence attached, the assigned reviewer signs it off. Sign-off is the readiness gate — it's how the dashboard knows the entry is ready for QSA review. Evidence state describes where the evidence came from; sign-off describes whether someone has reviewed it.

See Sign-off.

6. Hand it to your QSA

When your dashboard shows enough entries signed off, you have two options for delivering the package — both produce the same contents.

• Share with QSA (recommended) — click Share with QSA on the cycle detail page, enter your QSA's email, and Ankos sends a secure download link directly to them. You can revoke the link any time; it expires after 7 days. See Share with QSA.
• Export Evidence Package — click Export Evidence Package to download the ZIP yourself. Use this for internal review, board reports, or any case where you want a local copy. See Evidence export.

Either way, the package contains:

• A summary PDF
• Evidence files organized by category
• Consistent file naming
• Integrity manifest

The final compliance determination is made by your QSA.

Next steps