Our favourite blogs to write are always the ones in which we are able to inform you of changes we have made that we believe will make your lives (well, your lives as Certifiers or Certification Coordinators, anyway) significantly easier. That is certainly the case this week!
On Tuesday 2nd April 2019 we will be making some changes to the layout of your Approved Body and Certifier admin areas. These changes have been made based on a combination of feedback we have received from our members, and our own experiences - many is the time we have attempted to write a blog giving you ‘simple’ instructions for how to do something, only to suddenly have a new sympathy for those that have had trouble with it!
We have split this week’s blog into two; this one will deal with the Approved Body admin area which Certification Coordinators have access to when logged in, while Certifiers should ensure they read this one: New Approved Certifier Admin Area
Although the changes are largely cosmetic, they will nonetheless take a bit of getting used to. Indeed, many of our existing blogs and tutorials will need tweaking to ensure accuracy with the new layouts, while some are likely to be withdrawn if no longer required. We are in the process of doing this, and will keep you posted, but we would advise you for now to use this as your main crib sheet for how to access common processes. Although, without wishing to blow our own collective trumpet too much, we are confident the improvements we have made will ensure you need far fewer visits to this or any other crib sheet in future!
Welcome to your new and improved Approved Body Admin Area!
Rather than get bogged down in comparisons with the old version, we will instead concentrate on helping you access the most common processes you are likely to need:
Accessing certificates
As with the Approved Certifier Admin Area, in the improved Body Admin Area we have increased the prominence and accessibility of SER certificates, which given they are the bedrock of the Scheme seems a logical change. Via the Approved Body Certificates section coordinators will be able to quickly and easily access all certificates generated for the firm via the Completed Certificates Report, plus the Certificate Summary Report breaks down the certificates generated for your firm by each Certifier.
We have also introduced one new piece of functionality in this section: you can now access the invoices to all certificates generated for your Approved Body without having to find the general payment report and filter it by payment type. In the newfound spirit of labelling everything as clearly and obviously as possible, you can view your Approved Body’s certificate invoices by selecting ‘View Certificate Invoices (Approved Body)’.
Account
This is where you will find the various reports relevant to your account. So you can access your old audit reports and outcome emails, details of renewals and your general payment history (you are able to use the filters to narrow your invoices by Application, Renewal, Certificate or Audit-related payments), as well as being able to trace any historical changes in your membership status.
Update Details
We bet you can’t guess what this section allows you to do? As we said previously, we won’t labour too much on the old layout, but it seems such an obvious improvement to have an easily accessible, clearly labelled area for you to make changes to your firm’s contact and operational details as well as your staff training, QA and obligations policies plus the Local Authorities applicable to your business that we’re frankly a bit miffed we didn’t think of it before.
Certification Coordinators
As you are hopefully aware, we recently made some hefty improvements to the actual functionality of the process to change, switch or amend certification coordinators - details of these changes can be found in the Certification Coordinator Changes blog - what we have done with the new layout is to make the relevant section easier to access.
Application
This is still the area in which you can access your Approved Body application form and acceptance letter, but we have simply moved it to the bottom of the options as once you have completed the application and assessment process it is the area you are least likely to be logging into the site to access.
We must say, compiling this blog has provided further gratifying evidence that these changes will help you on a day-to-day basis, as frankly we have less to explain than we thought. We very much hope you agree!
We will finish with our usual request: hopefully these changes show that we do listen to the feedback from our members. Indeed, although the layout improvements are largely cosmetic, we are also constantly discussing improvements we can make to the functionality of the SER system. We would therefore be grateful for any suggestions for changes you would like to see in the future, whether they be cosmetic or relating to new features.