What is conditional visibility?

Conditional visibility is the audit-template feature that shows or hides question groups at runtime based on metadata on the location record or the auditor's prior answers. In a franchise tier audit, the metadata field is franchisee tier, and the audit a corporate unit sees, the audit a franchisee sees, and the audit a licensee sees are all rendered from one master template with different branches firing.

The underlying problem it solves is template sprawl. Without conditional logic, a franchisor running corporate, franchisee, and licensee tiers ends up maintaining three separate audit templates, or six once you split by store format, and any change to brand standards forces a parallel edit in every template. Conditional visibility consolidates that into one template with rules: change the question once, every tier sees the change, no parallel maintenance.

It pairs naturally with nullify scoring, the rule that hidden question groups don't deduct from the audit score. Without nullify scoring, a 60-question Seasoned-operator audit would post a 30% score because 140 hidden questions read as zero. With it, a Seasoned audit and a New-operator audit can both score 100% off the same template. For background on the full audit framework these features sit inside, see the conditional audits overview and weighted audit scoring with critical-item thresholds.

Worked example, conditional visibility in action

Picture an 80-unit QSR system with three tiers on the location record: 22 corporate-owned, 48 franchisee, and 10 licensee (small-format airport and stadium kiosks). The franchisor maintains one master template with 200 questions across nine groups: food safety, line check, opening procedures, brand-mark placement, drive-thru speed, patio cleanliness, training-completion verification, POS configuration, and active-promo execution. Conditional rules render a different effective audit per tier:

**

Audit attribute, Corporate unit (Seasoned-92% last score), Franchisee unit (New-60 days open), Licensee kiosk

Question count rendered, 55 (exception audit), 180 (full foundation audit), 38 (limited-format audit)

Cadence, Quarterly, Weekly during 0-90-bi-weekly through month 6, Monthly

Major-item scoring weight, 5 points, 3 points (coaching tier), 5 points

Critical-item SLA, 24h-photo-GM closes, 24h-photo-GM + franchisor field manager notified, 24h-photo-icensee operator + corporate notified

Hidden groups, Foundation drills-POS configuration-training verification, None, Drive-thru-patio-full-line back-of-house

**

The rule logic on the template reads roughly like this:

**

Tier, Trigger condition, Question groups shown, Question groups hidden

Corporate, Last audit score 90% or higher, Food safety-line check-active promo-prior weak items, Foundation drills-POS config- training verification

Franchisee, First 4 months open, All question groups, None

Licensee, Kiosk store format, Food safety-brand mark-active promo-kiosk-specific block, Drive-thru-patio-full back-of-house

**

Pull the rendered audits across all 80 stores into a rollup and the dashboard reflects what each tier actually does, not what the template thinks every location should be doing. A licensee kiosk that aces its 38 questions posts a 100% score the same way a corporate unit acing 55 exception questions does. Both numbers are honest. For a sibling pattern that branches on physical store format instead of franchisee tier, see the patio vs no-patio conditional audit walkthrough. For cadence triggered by season or weather, see seasonal conditions audits.

Per GoAudits' franchisee monitoring research, 19.3% of franchisees now run multiple locations, which means tier logic isn't just "corporate vs. franchisee" anymore. It has to handle multi-unit franchisee operators with mixed-maturity portfolios under one entity.

How does conditional visibility differ from static audits?

Static audits ask every question at every store at the same cadence. Conditional audits branch the question set, the cadence, and the scoring weights off location metadata.

**

Attribute, Static audit, Conditional audit

Behavior at N/A items, Question shown anyway-often marked "N/A" sometimes still deducts, Question hidden at render time. Nullify scoring removes it from the denominator

Score impact at format mismatch, Underscores stores missing irrelevant equipment, Score reflects only what the location is supposed to do

Templates required for 3 tiers × 4 formats, Up to 12 parallel templates, One master template with conditional rules

Update cycle when brand standards change, Edit each template. Reconcile drift, Edit once. Every tier inherits

Auditor experience, Same form regardless of tier, Form length and depth match the audit's purpose

**

The static-audit pattern is what most franchise systems used before conditional logic became standard. For the side-by-side on the displacement target, see the Xenia vs Zenput comparison. For the scoring half of the equation, see weighted audit scoring explained.

Per Operandio's published franchise-audit research, operators replacing flat checklists with branched workflows report cutting compliance paperwork from roughly 20 hours per week to 3, a reclaim that only materializes once the audit stops being uniform across tiers. That's third-party industry research, not a Xenia customer figure, but it's directionally consistent with why tier-conditional audits exist.

How to set up conditional visibility in Xenia

Tier-conditional audits are a configuration project, not a software project. A multi-unit franchisor can ship a working tier-conditional model in roughly 30 days. The working sequence:

1. Define the tier matrix on the location record. Add franchisee tier (corporate, franchisee, licensee), franchisee maturity (New 0-90, Ramping 3-12 mo, Seasoned), last audit score, store format, and risk flags as fields on every location. This matrix is the source of truth for every conditional rule downstream.
2. Build the master audit template once. All question groups live on a single template: food safety, line check, opening procedures, brand-mark placement, drive-thru, patio, training verification, POS configuration, active promo. Conditional rules decide which groups render per audit run.
3. Wire the show/hide rules per group. For each question group, set who sees it in plain English. An exception-style group shows for corporate and franchisee units classified Seasoned with a last audit score of 90% or higher. Foundation drills show only for units in their first 90 days. The drive-thru speed block shows only for units with a drive-thru on file.
4. Wire the scoring weights per tier. Critical items hold at 10 points across every tier, food safety and life safety don't get a coaching discount. Major items run at 5 points for Seasoned operators and 3 points for New operators. Minor items suppress entirely on the Seasoned-quarterly exception audit and re-enable when score drops below 90%.
5. Wire the corrective-action SLAs. Severity × tier maps to due-date offset and notification list. Critical means 24 hours and photo verification at every tier. Major means 72 hours for New, 7 days for Standard, 14 days for Seasoned-High. Minor runs 14 to 30 days, sometimes logged-only for the top tier.
6. Schedule the cadence engine, then publish. New = weekly, Ramping = bi-weekly, Seasoned-Standard = monthly, Seasoned-High = quarterly, Underperformer = bi-weekly intensive. Risk-event triggers like a health-department finding, complaint cluster, or GM change override the standing cadence with a 7-day spot audit on the affected risk area.

The pitfall every operator hits: tiering the audit without automating the cadence. If a human is manually deciding each week which stores get which audit, the system collapses by month four. The tier classification has to be a property of the location record, with cadence firing off it automatically. For the corrective-action half of the loop, see corrective action tracking from audit failure to closed resolution.

Where do operators see results?

Franchise systems hit this wall as soon as they have more than one tier with meaningfully different maturity, format, or performance levels. A 60-day-old franchisee location and a five-year corporate unit scoring 92% shouldn't run the same audit at the same cadence. Tiering the audit, the cadence, and the corrective-action SLA together is what makes the rollup numbers honest: a licensee kiosk's 100% and a corporate unit's 100% mean the same thing, because each was only ever scored on what it's actually responsible for.

The legal posture matters here too. Per the FTC Franchise Rule Compliance Guide, franchisors have broad latitude to set audit cadence as long as tier definitions are documented in the operations manual (Item 14) and applied consistently. Critical food-safety findings still need to align with FDA Food Code imminent-health-hazard expectations, which is why every tier should hold to the same 24-hour critical SLA regardless of tier. Tier logic varies cadence and depth. It shouldn't vary the contractual remedy.