A rule set is a bundle of compliance rules — your company's written-down answer to what does a complete record look like here. ARC evaluates them against each home's data and stores the result.

Rule sets are configured once, at company level, and then applied to homes. One set can cover every home you run.

Where they live

Sidebar, Company Admin, the Compliance rules tile — "Rule sets, and which homes they apply to". The page is headed Compliance Rules.

The list shows each set with its rule count and how many of those rules are enabled. One set may be marked Default; the rest show as Custom.

Create a rule set

Select Create Rule Set.
Name it, and add a Description if it helps whoever comes after you.
Tick Set as default rule set if this should be the set homes fall back to.
Create Rule Set.

The default matters because of what happens to a home you never explicitly assign: it uses the company's default set. So the default is not decoration — it is what most homes will actually be running on.

Add a rule

From the rule set's page, Create Rule.

Field	What it is
Key	A short stable identifier, e.g. `journal.final_by`
Rule Type	Which check this is — see below
Title	What staff and managers see when the rule fires
Description	Optional detail
Target	Child (checked per young person) or Home
Cadence	Per Day or Per Shift
Rule Parameters	The thresholds, which change with the type
Sort Order	Where it sits in the list
Enabled	Untick to switch a rule off without deleting it

Write the Title as the sentence a manager should read at 8am. It is what appears when the rule fires, so "Journal finalised by 10am" beats "R1".

The six rule types

On screen	What it checks
Journal Final By	The journal is finalised by a cutoff time
Journal Required Sections	Named sections are completed
Incident Lifecycle	Incidents don't stay open past a limit
Incident Manager Review	Incidents at or above a severity are reviewed in time
High Severity Event Linking	Severe events are linked to an incident
Safeguarding Acknowledgement	Concerns are acknowledged within a window

Choosing a type fills in sensible starting parameters, which you then adjust.

When rules are checked

Evaluation is a scheduled job, not something that runs as you type. It runs once a day at 01:00, and by default covers the previous day. Per-shift rules need the home's handover shift times configured (see Set up shifts and rota settings); without them, they produce nothing to evaluate.

Turning a rule on will not therefore change anything on a dashboard until the next run.

Before you rely on a rule to stop someone

The Enforcement Options on the rule form are not what ARC reads when it decides to block an action. Creating a rule here records the expectation and gets it evaluated — it does not, by itself, stop a manager finalising a journal.

The rules that block journal finalisation are the ones carrying that instruction in the default set ARC seeds for a company. If you need a new rule to block or to notify a role, check the behaviour before you depend on it.

Rules and rule sets are not deleted

There is no delete for either. A rule you no longer want is switched off by unticking Enabled; it stays in the set, visible, marked Disabled.