Policies are the written documents that set out how your organisation expects its homes to operate — safeguarding, behaviour management, health and safety. They are reference material for staff to read, not automated checks. The page calls them Company Policies and describes them as "Reference documents — safeguarding, behaviour management, health and safety. Shared across all homes."

They belong to the company, not the home

You reach Policies through a home, under Compliance in the sidebar, but the list is the company's — every home in the company sees the same policies. Add one from any home and it appears in all of them.

Anyone can read; managers and company admins write

Every member of the home can open Policies and read what is there. Creating, editing and publishing are reserved for the home's manager and for company admins — but the Add policy button is drawn only for someone whose home role is manager, so a company admin who is not a manager of a home will not see it, even though the request would be allowed.

Add a policy

Select Add policy. The Add a policy dialog opens.
Enter a Title. This is the only required field — ARC will not save without it.
Choose a Category (optional). Safeguarding, Behaviour management, Health and safety, Operations, or Other.
Attach the Original document (optional). A Word document (.docx or .doc) or a PDF, up to 20MB. Staff can open a PDF in the browser or download a Word file from the policy card.
Write the Policy text (optional). Type it in the editor, which has headings, bold and italic, links, lists, quotes and tables.
Select Create policy.

The policy is saved as a Draft. Everyone in the company is notified at this point — creation raises a notification, not just publication.

Bring a policy in from Word

Most policies already exist as Word documents. Select Import from Word above the editor and choose the .docx file. ARC copies its text into the editor — headings, lists and tables included — so staff can read it on the page and you can edit it there. If no document is attached yet, the same Word file is attached as the original too.

Import reads .docx files only. Save an older .doc as .docx in Word first, or attach it as the original without importing it. Pictures in the document are not copied into the text; the attached original keeps them. Complex layout — text boxes, columns, headers and footers — does not come across, so check the text reads properly before you publish.

Publish it

Select a policy card to expand it, then select Publish. The badge changes from Draft to Published, ARC records who published it and when, and every member of every home in the company is notified again. The confirmation reads "Policy published — all staff have been notified."

A policy needs something to read before it can be published: either its text or an attached document. Without either, ARC refuses with "Add the policy text or attach its document before publishing."

Publishing happens once. A second attempt is refused with "This policy has already been published." If the policy needs to change, edit it — the edit is kept as a new version and the v number on the card moves.

Replacing or removing the document

Open the policy with Edit. Select the cross beside the attached document to remove it, then choose another file to replace it, and save. The old file is not deleted — earlier versions of the policy still refer to it.