Compliance, Audits, Certification and Quality Control

After ensuring you are making money and stress free, the next most important role of your practice management system is to help you be compliant.

Compliance may be to gain or maintain industry specific certification or ISO900* that means you can tender for more projects.  Or it may be to prepare for a compulsory audit required to obtain or maintain your business licence.  Or, maybe it is self-imposed with the goal of being the best, most efficient and profitable company in your industry.

eTrack has been used by NSW, QLD and WA Government Audit Offices to track thousands of audits annually and thus has all the features needed to manage quality and compliance.

Gone are the days of large documents defining processes.  An auditor needs visibility of processes being followed.   That means contemporaneous timesheets and progress notes, standardised documents that are being used across your company, and a knowledge base of checklists that everyone is following.

eTrack ‘ticks the boxes’ of many compliance requirements and since combined with timesheets and email in the same application it encourages staff to follow the processes thus proving they are being used and ideally continuously improved.

Key Benefits

  • Vastly reduce the cost and time to prepare for an audit or to be certified.
  • Painlessly and accurately prepare material such as for a client’s court case.
  • Integrated with timesheets and emails that means staff are encouraged to use.
  • Provides proof to auditors of ongoing compliance by all staff.
  • Tailor any number of compliance Registers to your industry requirements.
  • Maintain a knowledge base of Quality Checklists for staff to follow.
  • Define multiple project templates with Stages and Tasks.
  • Setup secure workflows controlling status changes and document approvals.
  • Create a repository of standardised document templates.
  • Immensely powerful audit trail providing a history of who changed what, when.
  • Proven by Australian Government Audit Offices.
  • Helps you have a Level 5 Capability Maturity Model.

Define Compliance and Quality Registers

Registers can be tailored to your industry and company requirements and fields within the Registers defined. Security controls who can access and change each of the separate registers.
Registers are like special spreadsheets that can be edited ‘in place’, grouped, sorted, filtered, instantly searched, printed, exported and graphed.

Knowledge base of Quality Checklists

Very popular with eTrack users is the use of Quality Checklists that are a guide for staff as to what to do at every stage of a project, and a record as to who, when and what was done for auditing purposes and to send to the client.

Standardised Documents

Standardise documents across your company by collating existing Microsoft Office templates and reference them from eTrack so they can be accessed from the New Document dialog.
Populate the document templates with ‘bookmarks’ so when opened they are auto-populated with data and reports from eTrack.
Index your existing project file server, representing in eTrack all directories and files under you projects without duplication and without changing the file server. This means you have a holistic quality control of all documents while still being able to access them outside eTrack.

By no means necessary but if you wish, control access to documents using an ‘Access Security’ level. Optionally control document workflow by defining statuses, who can change the status and what Statuses it can be changed to and assign staff members to review documents.

 

Audit Trail and History

eTrack maintains an Audit Trail of everything going changed. This is incredibly valuable as a record and for analysing who changed what and when across your whole company.
It magically works in the background without any performance impact since uses a ‘feed’ to interrogate existing database tables to collage all information relevant to a selection such a staff member, contact or project etc. Timesheets and expenses are included, status changes and re-assignments.

Capability Maturity Model

If you are familure with the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) then you will likely see the value in using eTrack to track quality and move your company to a new level.
The basic deployment of eTrack will help move you from Level 2 to Level 3 where processes and templates are defined and staff use is monitored. Without you doing anything more eTrack will collect metrics of project budgets and changes and take you to close to Level 4. With all the information gathered over a year or so there is no reason why you can’t analyse it and look for improvements in processes taking you to Level 5. Very few companies are at Level 5!