Certification Authority

A certification authority is whoever issues a certificate to the company: the standards body behind an ISO certificate, the agency behind a buyer compliance certificate. It is a short list, set up once, and it is read by Certification and by nothing else.

Where

Organization and Setup › Setup › Certification Authority

Who uses it

The implementation consultant, once at setup

When

Before Certification

Needs first

Country, if you want to mark a primary authority

What it is for

The company holds certificates of its own, separately from the ones its people hold. Those certificates were issued by somebody, and the issuer is worth naming once rather than typing in free text on every certificate.

That is all this screen does: a code, a name, and two notes about what kind of body it is. The whole record exists so the certificate list can name its issuer consistently.

Do not confuse this with the people side. The certificates a member of staff holds - a forklift licence, a first aid certificate - are set up on Certification in People Directory and recorded on Employee Certification. This screen and the two that follow it are about the company, not the person.

Every field, in plain words

Field	What it means	What to put in it	Notes
Certification Authority	Your short code for the issuer.	PSQCA	Required. It must be unique.
Name	The issuer as it should read on a certificate.	Pakistan Standards and Quality Control Authority	Required.
Related To Government	Whether this is a government body rather than a private one.	Tick it for a government authority, leave it clear for a private certifying agency.	It records what kind of body it is. Nothing is calculated from it.
Primary For Country	The country this is the main authority for.	Pakistan	Optional, picked from the country list. Fill it where the client has issuers in more than one country and one of them is the default.

How to configure it

1. Collect the client existing certificates and read the issuer off each one.
2. Open Certification Authority and create one record per issuer. Type the code and the full name.
3. Tick Related To Government for the government bodies.
4. Set Primary For Country where it applies.
5. Save, then go to Certification and check the authority appears in its list.

Scenarios

"Our ISO certificate says one issuer and the buyer audit certificate says another"

Two records, one per issuer. Both are then offered on the certificate list and each certificate names its own.

What it is connected to

• Read by Certification, which records the company own certificates.
• Nothing else in PeopleNest reads it. No report, no calculation and no other screen depends on it.
• The employee equivalent is Certification in People Directory, which is a different screen with a similar name.

If something looks wrong

• "The save says the code cannot be empty" - the Certification Authority field is blank. Both the code and the name are required.
• "The save says the name cannot be empty" - type the name of the issuing body.
• "The save says it already exists" - that code is already used. Codes must be unique.
• "I cannot find where this authority is used" - only on Certification. It is used nowhere else.