Questions and answers

You take it with you. Everything in the portal is your data and your intellectual property: documents, registers, records, evidence. We export the lot to you on request or at the end of an engagement, in a form you can keep working with. There is no clause anywhere that holds your management system hostage, and we would not want one: a client who stays because leaving is painful is not a client, it is a hostage.

Depends what they do for you. If they run your internal audits and management reviews, The Toolkit gives them a far better system to work in than the folder of spreadsheets they have now, and you keep them; we can even give them their own access. If what you actually have is someone who appears twice a year to help you survive an audit, The Quality Manager replaces that arrangement with one that keeps the system alive in between, for roughly what a handful of consultancy days costs. Step up again and The Compliance Director puts us hands-on in your system every month.

Auditors do not certify software; they test whether your management system meets the standard and whether you can evidence it. What they consistently want is documented information that is controlled, current, retrievable and demonstrably maintained. That is precisely what a clause-indexed portal with issue control, review dates, sign-offs and attached evidence produces. In practice it makes their visit shorter, because nothing has to be hunted for. We built it as auditors, for the audit.

Spreadsheets are excellent at getting you certified and poor at keeping you certified. They do not tell you a review is overdue, they do not hold the evidence next to the record, they do not prove who signed what and when, and they quietly become one person's private system. The nonconformities we see raised are almost never for doing the work badly. They are for not being able to show the work was done. That is a filing problem, and it is the one thing a portal solves outright.

It depends on the tier, and we are deliberately blunt about it. On The Toolkit you do, in a portal that is already structured and templated, ready for your system to move into. On The Quality Manager we do the internal audit, the management review and the quarterly upkeep, and your team keeps the day-to-day records ticked. On The Compliance Director we are in your system every month and a named consultant watches every clause between visits. Nobody at any tier is left with a blank portal and good luck.

Yes, and it is the cheaper end of the decision. Building a management system from nothing is where most of the consultancy cost sits; starting inside a portal that already holds the framework to everything the standard asks for means you are adapting rather than authoring. For a new certification we build the portal as we build your management system, so you arrive at your stage 1 audit with everything already in one place and a system that has been running for months, which is a materially different conversation from arriving with a folder finished last week. The monthly rhythm then keeps it real long after the certificate is on the wall.

ISO 9001:2026 was published on 16 September 2026, and your 2015 certificate stays valid through a three-year transition window that closes in September 2029. Your portal already carries a live gap analysis of every new and changed requirement, showing who owns each one and when it is due. On The Quality Manager and The Compliance Director we do the transition work with you as part of the service. There is no separate transition fee. See what changed →

Completely. Each client has their own private portal, so your data is never mixed with anyone else's, it's hosted in the UK, and it's yours: we export everything to you on request or at the end of an engagement.

Typically inside a fortnight. We configure your portal, seed it from our framework and your existing documents, set your compliance-year start month, and walk your team through it. Most people are ticking their first checklist the same week.

As many as you need. We don't charge per seat. Your whole team, and your sites, work in the same portal.

That's exactly what it's built for. One integrated system covers ISO 9001, 14001, 45001, 27001, AS9100 and 13485. Shared registers appear once, and standard-specific registers appear only when that standard is in your scope, and switching a standard on or off is a toggle.

You open the portal. The registers are current because they've been kept monthly, the evidence is attached to the records it proves, the management review is on file as a clean report, and our internal audit is already complete from month 10. Certification visits become a walkthrough, not an excavation.

Three simple tiers: The Toolkit, The Quality Manager and The Compliance Director, all with unlimited users and UK hosting. See the pricing page for the full breakdown; your exact figure is confirmed in writing at the walkthrough.