my customer modified the questionnaire after I had already started, what now

A mid-term change is usually a new version

If your customer modifies the questionnaire halfway through, it usually concerns a new version of the same portal format, not a correction to your answers. Customers do this regularly: a question is split, an additional question about AI usage is added, or the format switches from their own Excel to a sector standard such as the VSME basic module. For you, this mainly means extra work, not that your previous answers were wrong.

The practical approach is: upload the new version into the system instead of modifying your old entry. The system recognizes which questions have remained unchanged and automatically fills those in again from the supply chain file. For new or modified questions, you only see the fields where there is no source data yet — there you immediately see whether that is a question you have already answered for another customer (then it is a matter of reuse) or a genuinely new topic. Questions about AI deployment, for example, are increasingly appearing as additions to existing cyber lists; whether the undertaking uses AI systems in its service delivery is then a new answer that you must record separately. Continue to confirm each answer with yes or no before submitting again to your customer's portal — also for reused answers, because an old answer to a slightly differently worded question is not automatically still correct.

Why reuse works: the supply chain file remains the source

This works because the underlying facts — such as the number of employees or the countries in which the company has establishments — rarely change between two versions of a questionnaire. What changes is your customer's question formulation, not the answer itself. For topics that align with a fixed standard, such as the ten measures of Article 21(2) of the NIS2 Directive or the control measures in Annex A of ISO/IEC 27001, the source data therefore remains usable even if the portal uses a different order or formulation.