Quality Assurance and ISO Documentation Editing and Proofreading Services

There are two documents in most quality systems with the same title. One is the procedure that satisfied the auditor: it references clauses, defines terms, and describes a process in the passive voice. The other is the sheet of A4 taped inside a cupboard door that tells you what actually to do. The second one is the real procedure, and the fact that it had to be written at all is the finding nobody records.

We edit what quality managers and consultants produce — procedures and work instructions, quality manuals and management system documentation, process descriptions and flow documentation, forms and record templates, internal audit programmes, checklists and reports, non-conformance and corrective action procedures, management review inputs and outputs, document control and revision procedures, competence and training documentation, and certification body audit responses. Our editors work on the procedure the person doing the job will actually use.

Procedures are where a quality system either helps or becomes overhead, and the failure is writing for the auditor rather than the operator. An auditor needs to see that a process is defined; the person doing it needs to know what to do next. We work through these so the procedure is written in the second person and the active voice, addressing the person who performs the task rather than describing what is performed, since "the goods received note shall be reconciled against the purchase order" leaves who and how to be inferred; so the steps are in the order the work happens rather than in the order of the standard's clauses, because a procedure organised around a clause structure is unusable by anyone; so every decision point states the criterion and who decides, given that this is where a procedure either controls a process or merely narrates it; so the forms and records are named where they are used and shown, as a procedure referring to QF-4471 without showing it sends the reader looking; so anything that only exists to satisfy a clause is either removed or marked as such honestly, since a system where half the content is ballast teaches people to skim all of it; so the exceptions and the route for them are included, because undocumented exceptions are the whole reason the cupboard-door version exists; and so the procedure is short enough to read at the point of use. Procedures written this way pass audits and get followed, which are two separate achievements.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including procedures, audit records and client documentation. We are editors rather than quality practitioners or auditors, and we offer no view on system design, conformity or audit outcomes. What we can do is make the procedure and the cupboard door say the same thing.