Choosing a certification body is a decision worth ten minutes of thought and it is one most businesses make on price alone. We do it with you, based on an objective review of what you actually need.
Do you need accredited certification
The first question, and the one that changes the cost most. Read the wording of whatever is driving this. Some tenders name UKAS specifically. Some say accredited without naming a body. Plenty say certified to ISO 9001 and say nothing about accreditation at all, and a surprising number of businesses assume the strictest reading and pay several times more than they needed to.
Accredited certification starts from around £1,500 for ISO 9001 in a small business. Non-accredited typically comes in under £1,000 for a single standard. If nobody is asking for accreditation, the more expensive route buys recognition you may never use.
All figures are exclusive of VAT at 20%.
Cost
For accredited certification, audit duration is set by the accreditation rules and calculated from your staff numbers, sites and risk. The certification body charges for those days and cannot go below the minimum, which is why quotes from different accredited bodies land within a similar range.
A quote well below the others usually means fewer days than the rules allow, and that becomes your problem at the next surveillance visit. Compare audit days, not headline price, and compare the whole three-year cycle rather than the first invoice.
Availability
This gets overlooked until it becomes the problem. There is a shortage of qualified auditors and some certification bodies simply cannot get an assessor to you in a workable timescale. Lead times of several weeks to a few months are normal, longer at year end.
So ask when they can actually do the stage 1 and stage 2 audits, not when they can send a quote, and get the date in writing. A body that is cheaper on paper is not cheaper if it cannot assess you before your tender deadline.
What we do
- Work out whether you need accredited certification at all
- Get quotes and compare them properly, on days rather than price
- Check accreditation and scope on the register, because accreditation is scope-specific and a body accredited for ISO 9001 is not automatically accredited for ISO 27001 or for your sector
- Check availability against your actual deadline
- Read the contract terms, particularly notice periods and automatic renewals
- Arrange the audit and make sure you are ready for it
Being ready for the audit
Stage 1 is a readiness review of your documented system, often remote and often half a day. Stage 2 is the real assessment, where the assessor samples your processes and talks to your staff.
Our job is to make sure that by the time the assessor arrives, your people know the system and can answer for it, because it is theirs. A system that needs a consultant sitting in the room to survive its own audit is not a system you own, and you would be paying for that every year.
Findings at a first audit are normal and get closed out as part of the process. Our guide to preparing for a certification audit covers what to have ready, and choosing a certification body goes through the checks in detail.