Finance and the ISO/AS QMS

Why isn’t Finance a visible part of your company’s Family, a process of the QMS?

Darn. Good. Question.

Every department and process of an organization is covered under the QMS umbrella, be it ISO 9001 or AS9100. Finance is **traditionally** not considered to fall under the scope of the QMS since CB auditors are not considered capable of assessing **financial compliance** to **financial rqmts**.

Yet why is it that non-technical CB auditors are considered “experts” in auditing technical processes? How can technical CB auditors make effective assessments of compliance for non-technical processes?

Finance creates and maintains records, uses documents and procedures, provides a (financial) service to the organization as well as to the organization’s customers and stakeholders. Finance makes use of corrective actions, preventive actions, training, must provide KPIs, and it maintains compliance to ITAR, SOX, and other regulatory and statutory requirements. Almost like a real company, isn’t it?

Into the Future

So, into the 21^st Century, it’s time to step out of the box and audit the financial arena as a QMS process. It is not unusual to perform internal audits of finance (A/P and A/R) regarding record keeping, record retention and retrieval, document control, training, competences, and corrective and preventive actions. Finance is most certainly a key element of an organization. Finance is held accountable by GAAP and regulatory obligations…but the QMS obligations remain. They never disappeared – we merely ignored them out of convenience.

Making your Case…

One needs to make a clear, calm, objectively-based case to Top Management to bring Finance back into the Family. There are many methods – forced compliance, mandatory attendance to engineering meetings – but to observe Finance willingly offer its interest to participate is the crème de la crème. Some suggestions might help –

•  Begin to invite and include appropriate Finance representatives to customer meetings. Through this activity, not only does the customer meet a normally invisible member from Finance but the activity includes Finance as a welcome member. Finance is viewed and presented in a participatory manner.

• Include Finance in all management review meetings, regardless of past attendance. Provide expectations of Finance in the form of agenda items, in the same vein as the requirements called out in ISO 9001:2008, clause 5.6. Even with the 9001:2015 std soon to be released, all existing ISO 9001 QMS will remain compliant to the 2008 requirements. This will continue until 2018 at the latest.

• Invite Finance during supplier scorecard and performance review meetings. Finance has an intrinsic interest as stakeholder and customer. After all, money is money, and Finance should be intimately involved with all cost-center and profit-center activities.

• Invite Finance to corrective action/preventive action meetings and internal audit reviews. Certainly, Finance may actually become deeply observant of cost-center activities like corrective actions, product recalls, mis-shipped or late-shipped product.

• Invite Finance to witness internal audits being performed. Gosh, what a notion! The representative can observe that internal audits are not conducted like Inquisitions of old, and that there is no ritual seppuku and no ritual dishonor of the auditee’s family if findings or nonconformances are issued. Internal audits are inherently healthy and safe for employees and QMS alike.

In Closing…

We hope these suggestions help to enlighten and re-assure employees that internal audits are safe, and that internal audits of Finance to the six mandatory documented procedures are a positive and perfectly normal expectation. There is no longer a reason to consider Finance as an estranged, or even exclusive, member of the Family.

Follow My Blog:
www.Lawrence-international-LLC.Blogspot.Com