A-76Stop item
What an assessor may ask to see: Order and contract review record, Works order or job instruction and TTM assessment form.
How it works
From your request to the day of your visit
SchemeReady is a self-assessment you fill in before your certification visit. You answer questions written from your standard and, for most standards, walk one of your sites with a phone. You then get a readiness report with a score, and an action plan to work through before the visit. It all happens in your web browser, so there's nothing to install and no visit to arrange. Your score comes from your own answers.
Time for one NHSS 12D assessment
- Key questions, up to 48
- About an hour to an hour and a half
- Every office question, if you choose to answer them all
- Three to five hours
- Report
- A few seconds
You can stop and carry on whenever you like, on any device. The times for every other standard are on the standards page.
Who does what
- You
- You set up your organisation, answer the profile and the office questions, and complete the assessment when your answers are final. As the account owner, you invite colleagues and choose what each of them can do.
- Your colleagues
- A Readiness Assessment licence has three places, including yours, for people who answer questions or walk a site. Whoever walks your site needs one of them. People who only read and export, such as your managing director, join as viewers and use no place.
- SchemeReady
- We send your price and invoice, set up your account and help with using the app by email. Nobody at SchemeReady reviews your answers or advises on them. SchemeReady administrators can read them when you ask us for help, to look into a fault or a security problem, or when the law requires it. Every read is recorded.
- Anyone else
- Apart from those reads, nobody outside your account sees your answers or your report unless you show them. If you accept an invitation from an assessment body, it can read your finished report once you complete, and nothing before.
Before you start
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Ask for access
Fill in the request form with your organisation's name, the standards you hold or are going for, and your name and email address. It helps to tell us when your visit is and how many people will answer. You see a confirmation straight away, and an email follows to say we've got your request. Sending it doesn't commit you to anything.
The request form for a fictional firm, the confirmation, and the email that follows. -
Price, invoice and your account
We reply soon with a price for the standards you picked. One standard, such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001 or NHSS 12D, is £179. A sector scheme's questions include the ISO 9001 requirements the scheme is built on, so a firm with 12D needs one licence. If you pick more than one standard, ISO 9001 is only charged once and any question they share appears once. A firm holding 12D and 16 answers 283 questions rather than the 359 in the two banks. You're still scored separately for each, so you might be ready for ISO 9001 and still have gaps to close for 12D. The other licences are on the pricing page.
If you go ahead, we send an invoice. Once it's paid, we either set up your account and email you a link to choose your password, or email you a code. The link works once, within seven days. With a code, you create your account with the address we sent it to, confirm the address, then enter the code.
If we set up your account, your welcome email lists what your licence includes and the date it runs until. You can have a full refund within fourteen days of buying. You don't have to give a reason.
The start of the welcome email when we set up the account, for a fictional firm.
Your assessment
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Set up your organisation and profile
You sign in with a web browser on a computer, tablet or phone. You see your next step on each screen, with roughly how long it takes. You start by setting up your organisation and choosing its standard.
Then you answer the profile questions, such as whether your work happens away from your own premises, whether you design what you deliver and, for 12D, which categories you work in. Questions that don't apply to your work are left out. Have your certificate and the report from your last visit to hand.
Add the date of your next visit if it's booked. You then see a countdown to it, and the target dates in your action plan count back from it.
The first steps for a fictional firm: the welcome, the start of the profile, and the next step once the profile is done. -
Answer the office questions
Each section starts with its key questions. If you answer a key question Partly, No or Don't know, the rest of that section's questions are added to your assessment. You can also add any section yourself, or answer every question, which takes two and a half to five hours for one standard.
You choose from "Yes, evidence to hand", "Yes, but I'd have to dig", "Partly" and "No". If you don't know, answer "Don't know". It scores nothing and goes on your list of things to find out. Where a question allows it, you can answer "Not applicable" and give the reason.
Each question lists what an assessor, the auditor your certification body sends, may ask to see, the clauses it relates to and which standards it counts toward. You can note how you meet it and where the evidence is kept.
Some questions are stop items. A stop item is a question where a gap, on its own, would give an assessor reason to raise a major finding, the most serious kind of finding.
Your answers save as you go, so you can stop and carry on another day, on any device. Colleagues you invite see the same answers. If two people answer a question differently, the later answer counts and the earlier one is still shown.
An illustration for a fictional firm. A Partly answer to key question A-80 added the rest of section A. Another question in the section, A-75, is then answered Partly. -
Walk one of your sites
Every sector scheme has a site walk, and so do ISO 14001 and ISO 45001. ISO 9001 and BS 99001 have none. For 12D, the walk covers six groups:
- paperwork on site
- people and cards
- layout and installation
- vehicles, plant and PPE
- public protection, conduct and complaints
- removal, waste and environment
There's one observation per screen. You record what you see, from "Seen and in order" to "Not in order", or "Could not check". You can type a photo reference, such as the file name on your phone, but SchemeReady doesn't store photos.
Whoever walks signs in on their own phone, using one of your three places.
You can walk as many sites as you like. Each walk gives you a dated site visit record. If a competent person does the walk, the record supports your internal audit site visits, but it doesn't meet that requirement on its own. The walk isn't a safety assessment.
An observation from the 12D site walk on a phone, for a fictional firm. It's a stop item, answered Seen and in order. -
See your progress and your report
Your assessment is the key questions plus every section that's been added. Until 90% of the office questions in it are answered, the report screen shows your progress, the stop items found so far and what's left to answer.
Once 90% are answered, you get a score and one of four bands: Ready, Nearly ready, Gaps to close or Not ready. Ready needs every question in your assessment answered and, where your standard has a site walk, at least one recorded walk. Each standard gets its own score and band.
The report is built from your answers and nothing else. Nobody has checked them against your documents. Only your certification body decides the outcome of your visit.
The readiness report is short. The action plan, the audit-day checklist and evidence list, a record of each site walk, a record of every answer and a management review agenda come as separate documents. For 12D there's also a registers workbook. The site walk records and the agenda are there from the start. You can change your answers and produce the report again as often as you like until you complete.
An illustration for a fictional firm: progress towards a score, then the report once 90% of the office questions in its assessment are answered.
Before and on the day of your visit
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Close the gaps
Every answer short of "Yes, evidence to hand" becomes an action, with what to do about it. Any stop item you didn't answer "Yes, evidence to hand" comes first. The two-week plan holds the actions that take hours or days. Actions that take weeks are planned for after your visit.
If you've set your visit date, each action gets a target date counted back from it. A date that's already passed reads "as soon as possible". Give each action an owner and mark it Open, In progress, Done or Not needed.
As you fix things, change your answers and produce the report again. You get a fresh score and band each time.
One action from a fictional firm's plan, for question A-75. -
Complete the assessment
When every question in your assessment is answered and every "Not applicable" has its reason, an owner or admin of your account completes it. Completing locks the answers and keeps the report with your account as the finished result. You can't undo it from the app.
You can still read and export everything, and update the action plan. Complete it when you're happy with your answers, before or after your visit.
The completion card for a fictional firm, before and after completing. -
On the day of your visit
Print the audit-day checklist and evidence list. The checklist sets out what to prepare and what to have on the table, including who will meet the assessor and stay with them. The evidence list shows each record the questions asked about, with where you said it's kept. Anything missing or still to find comes first.
Take your site visit records, if your standard has a site walk. For 12D, the registers workbook has twelve register sheets and a how-to sheet, with the current document editions filled in.
Your report and records are yours to show the assessor if you choose.
- Readiness report PDF
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Action plan
Excel PDF
Every action, with what to do, who owns it and when it's due.
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Audit-day checklist and evidence list
PDF Excel
What to prepare and what to have on the table.
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Site visit record
PDF
What was found on the day, to sign.
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Full answers
PDF
Every answer, with your notes and where the evidence is.
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Management review agenda
PDF
The agenda and minutes for your management review.
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Registers workbook
Excel
The registers an assessor asks to see, set out ready to keep.
The documents for a 12D assessment.
After you complete
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When you complete
The answers lock. You can still read and export everything, and update the action plan. The completion card shows a date six months after you complete.
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Thirty days before that date
We send one email to the account owner. You can export a copy whenever you like. An export is a file on your own computer, and it doesn't expire.
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Six months after completing
You can't change the action plan. You can still read and export what's there.
Each organisation completes its assessment once per standard. To run it again, for example before next year's visit, ask us. We'll send a price and add another assessment once it's paid. You answer the new assessment from the start.
You can see the date your licence runs until on Your licence in the app.
What happens to your data
Your answers save on your device first, so the site walk works with no signal. Then they save to your account, so anyone you've invited sees them on any device. The files you generate are made on your device. Like any website, the hosting provider logs the address your request came from. The privacy notice sets this out in full, including what the support inbox holds if you write to us.
The assessment is scored only on your answers and doesn't look at your files. If you answer "Yes, evidence to hand" when the record doesn't exist, the report will say you're readier than you are. To help you answer, every question says what an assessor tends to ask to see, and the evidence list asks you to write down where each item lives.
What you export can contain personal data, such as your staff's names and training details, if you type them into the registers or notes. You're responsible for that file, as you are for any other quality record. Signing out clears the copy in your browser.
AI checks
The AI checks before your visit
Three checks use AI to help you get ready for an assessor. You start each one yourself, and your data goes to the AI provider only then. Before the first run in a session, you tick one box to agree to it.
Check my answers
It reads every answer, note and site visit in your assessment and shows where an assessor is likely to ask for more. It reads no documents. It opens once your assessment has a score, and it's free with every Readiness Assessment.
Practise the audit
An assessor's questions on your weakest areas, one at a time. You type an answer and see what was good, what an assessor would still want and the record that would settle it. Two practices come with every Readiness Assessment.
Check my documents
You upload up to twelve documents, and each one is read against every question in your assessment that applies. You see what they show, with the page, what's missing and the smallest fix. It comes with Compliance Tools, three runs a year. A run can take several minutes.
Request access
Tell us which standards you hold and when your visit is, and we'll reply soon with a price. Sending a request doesn't commit you to anything.
The free check has ten questions on the records an assessor usually asks for early in a visit, for 12D, ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001 or BS 99001. Your result shows on screen, and your answers aren't saved or sent anywhere.