Objectives: Brief Assessment of Impaired Cognition (BASIC), which combines self- and informant report with cognitive testing, was previously found to be highly accurate in identification of dementia and cognitive impairment. The aim of the present study was to develop and validate a questionnaire version of BASIC, the BASIC-Q, for use in community settings. Methods: In order to construct a questionnaire version of BASIC, we substituted cognitive testing with questions regarding orientation. BASIC-Q was validated based on further analysis of data from the primary BASIC validation study, where patients consecutively referred from general practice were tested at their first memory clinic admission prior to diagnosis. Control participants were primarily recruited among participating patients' relatives. Expert clinical diagnosis was subsequently used as reference standard for estimation of classification accuracy. Results: A high discriminative validity (sensitivity 0.92, specificity 0.97) for cognitive impairment (n = 159) vs socio-demographically matched control participants (n = 109) was found. In comparison, the MMSE had 0.76 sensitivity and 0.81 specificity. Administration time for BASIC-Q was less than 5 minutes compared to approximately 10 minutes for the MMSE. Conclusions: BASIC-Q is a brief, efficient and valid tool for identification of cognitive impairment in a clinical setting. Further validation in a community setting is needed.