Audit week
Your chain of custody audit is coming up. Someone pulls the folder of merchant invoices showing certified paper purchases, then tries to match them to jobs where you made a claim on your invoice or printed a logo. Some jobs used stock from two deliveries, one certified and one not. Some invoices to customers carry the claim, some that should do not. The paper went into general stock, so the link between a specific delivery and a specific job is a best guess.
It takes days. And throughout the year, customers ask whether their job can carry the FSC logo, and the answer depends on who they ask.
Traceability is built from links nobody records
The rules for certified material are set by the scheme and your certification body, and they are for your own team and auditor to interpret. What they have in common is that you need to show where certified material came from, what happened to it and what you claimed when you sold it. Each of those is a link that most printers make manually.
- Merchant invoices show the certified claim, but stock is booked in without it.
- Certified and non-certified stock of the same paper can end up mixed on the racking.
- Jobs do not record which delivery or certified status of stock was used.
- Customer invoices carry claims typed by whoever raises them.
- The on-pack logo is added by the studio without a check against the job's stock.
What informal records cost
Audit preparation eats days of someone's time every year. Errors in claims, such as a logo printed on a job that used uncertified stock, are the kind of thing you do not want to discover at audit. Customers who need certified print for their own reporting lose confidence if your answers vary. And the whole system depends on one person who understands it, which is a risk if they leave.
Certification that travels with the stock
- When paper is booked in, the certified claim and certificate code from the merchant's invoice are recorded with the delivery.
- Certified stock is tracked as its own stock line, so it can be allocated to jobs separately.
- When a job needs certified material, only certified stock can be allocated to it, and the delivery used is recorded on the job.
- The studio sees whether a job is eligible for an on-pack logo before artwork is finalised, and the logo use is logged.
- Customer invoices for certified jobs carry the claim automatically, taken from the job, not typed.
- An audit view lists purchases, stock movements, jobs and sales claims for any period, with links between them, ready for your certification body to review.
| Link in the chain | Today | With the records |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase to stock | Invoice in a folder | Claim recorded at booking in |
| Stock to job | Best guess | Allocated and recorded |
| Job to logo use | Studio's judgement | Checked against the job |
| Job to invoice claim | Typed by hand | Carried automatically |
We do not interpret the scheme's rules or promise an audit outcome. We build the records your own procedures and auditor require.
Audit as a report, not a project
Preparing for audit becomes running a report and checking it. Account handlers can tell customers whether a job can carry a certified claim, because the system knows. Claims on invoices match the stock used. The same approach helps if customers ask for other environmental information about their print, because the stock used on every job is recorded.
Is your chain of custody on paper?
- Audit preparation takes days of matching invoices to jobs.
- Certified and non-certified stock are not separated in your records.
- Claims on customer invoices are typed by hand.
- Staff are unsure whether a job can carry a logo.
- One person understands how your records work.