Know the finding before the auditor writes it.

Adfirma reads your policies, procedures and records the way a certification auditor reads them, and grades every clause and control in the vocabulary they will use. Not a gap assessment you commission once a year. A workspace you keep.

Bring your real document set. Thirty minutes in you are reading your own findings, not a demo tenant.

A real finding from

Evidence read
Why it is graded this way

Adfirma proposes. You confirm, or you overrule it and say why — and that reasoning is what an auditor is actually asking for.

9 — Performance evaluation

Green ticks are for checkboxes. Audits are graded.

Your evidence is prose — policies, procedures, minutes, records. A tick cannot grade prose. Every requirement gets one of five verdicts, the same five you will hear at the closing meeting.

Adfirmant
Evidence holds, and you confirmed it.
Observation
Nothing wrong yet. Worth a note.
Opportunity
Conformant, but thin where it counts.
Minor NC
A single lapse against a requirement.
Major NC
Certification stops here until it is fixed.

No readiness percentage. No invented score. Coverage is a count of confirmed judgments, and the backlog is whatever is not green — ordered by severity.

4 — Context of the organisation

Built for the person who actually owns the management system.

The ISMS manager. The quality manager. The digital mental health provider carrying NSQDMH. Usually one person, holding it together with a spreadsheet, a SharePoint folder and a calendar reminder.

THE WEEK BEFORE THE VISIT

You don't know where it will hurt.

Somewhere in ninety-three controls there is a finding waiting, and if you also carry a sector scheme that is a second set of criteria nobody has read since it was written.

THE DOCUMENT SYSTEM

Your policies live in SharePoint. Your tool doesn't.

Every copy you upload elsewhere is stale the moment a colleague edits the original. Review dates lapse quietly. Nobody notices until someone external does.

THE AUDIT ITSELF

The auditor asks. You scramble.

“Show me how you meet A.8.12.” The answer exists, in a document, somewhere — and every request becomes another thread, another attachment, another wrong version.

8 — Operation

Answers you can be quoted on.

Ask what an auditor would ask. Every sentence comes back with the document and the paragraph it came from — and when your evidence does not support an answer, Adfirma says so instead of writing one.

Asked
How do we control access for leavers?

Access is revoked within twenty-four hours of termination. HR raises the ticket, IT confirms removal from the identity provider, and the quarterly access review checks the closure.

Offboarding Procedure §4.2 Access Control Policy §7 AUD-001 · internal audit 18 Mar 2026
Not supported by your evidence

Nothing in your documents covers revocation for third-party contractors. That is the gap, and it is yours to close while it is still private — not a finding with your name on it.

Documents stay where they live.

SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox — read in place, versioned immutably. When a colleague edits the risk methodology, exactly the assessments resting on it flag themselves. Not the whole programme. Not nothing.

Risk Methodology v3Edited in SharePoint 2 h ago · 2 assessments now stale Re-assess
Access Control PolicyReview was due 30 Jun · owner J. Rivers Overdue

The auditor gets a room, not a thread.

They request; you disclose exactly what they asked for; both sides keep the same record. Your working drafts stay working drafts.

24 JulAccess review records disclosed to M. Osei re A.5.18 · expires 07 Aug
23 JulRequest “full risk register export” declined — outside agreed scope
22 JulM. Osei invited as auditor — register and disclosures only
7 — Support

One document set. Every standard you carry.

A programme is one standard, because that is how you are certified and assessed. Your organisation can run several, and they read the same policies and records — each keeping its own scope, dates and findings.

Mapped, never assumed — you link each one, and the link is on the record.
Unmapped

ISO/IEC 27001:2022 · ISO 9001:2015 · NSQDMH:2020 today. SOC 2 and Essential Eight next. NSQDMH is assessed in Australia against Australian expectations, and Adfirma is hosted here, in Sydney.

6 — Planning

If your evidence is documents, checkbox tools were never built for you.

Checkbox platforms
Adfirma
Reads
Integration checkboxes
Your policies, procedures and records
Verdicts
Pass / fail ticks
The real scale — Adfirmant to Major NC
AI answers
Generated, unattributed
Cited, human-confirmed, refuses when unsupported
A second standard
A second subscription and a second data-entry job
One document set, mapped between schemes
10 — Improvement

The certification body books the date. You decide what they find.

Connect the drive your documents already live in. You do not need a tidy document set to start — the first grading runs on what is actually there, which is the point.

In-region hosting in Sydney · your evidence stays yours · originals stored immutably.