ProCert Portal

The ProCert Portal is a secure direct individual interface, which guarantees the necessary confidentiality, in compliance with our personal data protection declaration.

All mandates are executed through our ProCert Portal. This is a centralised, shared management approach that uses a minimum of paper.

Each audit assignment is dealt with in clearly defined stages, where the end of one stage triggers the start of the next (see Management Systems Certification Regulations). You know where your assignment is at all times. You have access to documents, certificates and audit reports from previous years, as well as to your own documents uploaded to the ProCert Portal. You can follow all exchanges with ProCert via an internal messaging system. The basic idea is to send you, as a client, messages via the Portal and not by email via your Outlook, for example. In this way, we will have a history of exchanges and full traceability for a given mandate, all stored in the same place. All the data is accessible only to the people involved in your mandate.

We will be happy to provide you with additional access for other employees. Please contact your account manager or operational coordinator.

You will find an overview of the most important steps in the certification regulations. We subdivide the steps before the audit, during the audit and after the audit.

You will usually receive an e-mail asking you to complete a task. In the e-mail below you will find a link that you can use to reply. Your reply will then be saved under messages in the mandate. Please do not reply by e-mail, i.e. not outside the Portal. You can also contact the team handling your case at any time, whether it's your operations coordinator, your contact person or your auditor.

You will upload your documents and files directly to our Portal.  To do this, go to the "Documents" tab in the mandate window, click on "Upload" and select the files you want to send to ProCert. You can upload several documents at the same time.

To download documents/files from our Portal. Simply go to the "Documents" tab in the mandate window, select the file(s)/document(s) you want to download and click on the "download" button. Pdf documents can also be viewed in the preview.

You can send us a message via the ProCert Portal from the "Messages" tab in the mandates window, which can be accessed at any time.

If you require IT support or encounter a malfunction on our Portal, you can send a request directly to our IT department using the "Support request" button in the banner at the top of the Portal.  If the request concerns a specific mandate, simply click on the "Support request for this mandate" button in the mandate window. Our IT department will then find a solution and contact you to let you know.

The customer is required to initiate appropriate measures if deviations or non-conformities are identified during the audit. On the one hand, this deviation or non-conformity should be rectified (so-called corrections) and, on the other hand, corrective measures should be taken so that this deviation/non-conformity does not occur again in the future (preventive measures). Determining the cause is therefore also of great importance.

The contractual parameters influence two central pillars: the minimum duration of the audit and the qualification required of the auditor. Non-compliance with the audit duration can lead to non-conformity by the SAS and automatically leads to non-conformity for standards such as IFS Food, BRCGS Food and FSSC 22000, because for these standards the minimum audit duration and the auditor qualifcation is automatically checked as soon as the data is uploaded to the relevant portals. If the duration is not respected, the audit and the certificate may be declared invalid. If the auditor is not qualified, the certificate may be suspended. Both ProCert and the auditor are sanctioned as part of the integrity programmes.

As a certification body, there are a multitude of requirements laid down by the standard holders and the accreditation body, which we must comply with and whose application we must guarantee for our auditors and our customers. To meet these requirements, we depend on your cooperation as a customer.  This guide has been designed to help you familiarise yourself with these rules and prepare for an audit with ProCert.

For you as a customer, all the central and important rules of good cooperation are described in it, whether it is about unannounced audits or how to deal with certain situations and much more.  ProCert auditors must use these guidelines, especially when conducting the opening and closing meetings.

You will find this information in the guide in a specially created chapter. You will also be contacted directly by your auditor via the ProCert portal about which documents you need to upload before the audit.