What a failed BRCGS audit actually costs a mid-market plant

There is no line item on any certification body price list called "failed audit fee". What a mid-market plant actually pays is a stack of four things, and only the first one is published. A repeat audit is charged as an audit: UK certification body fees for a BRCGS Food Safety audit are commonly quoted at £1,500 to £2,000 and upward for the audit itself, and one worked example of an inclusive two-day audit, including the BRCGS service fee of around £795, came to roughly £4,133.

The second cost is the grade, and it is the one most plants underweight. A grade C or D does not end your certification, it changes the clock. Certificates issued at C and D run six months rather than twelve, so you are audited twice in the year you would otherwise have been audited once, and at grade D the auditor returns to site within 28 days specifically to close out the non-conformities. On a £4,000 audit that is approximately £4,000 of spend nobody budgeted for, plus a second set of days where your QA team hosts an auditor instead of running the plant. Third is travel, charged at cost. Fourth is corrective action review, which some certification bodies bill separately, per non-conformity or by the hour.

No single missing certificate fails an audit

Worth saying plainly, because the opposite is often implied by people selling software. One missing supplier certificate does not fail a BRCGS audit. Grading is cumulative: broadly, 11 to 16 minors puts you at B, 17 to 24 at C, and a critical non-conformity or a major against a fundamental clause is what takes the certificate away outright.

The reason supplier documentation matters disproportionately is not that one gap is fatal. It is that the auditor samples, and a sample finds a pattern. If the auditor pulls six suppliers and two of them have an audit certificate that expired four months ago and a third has no allergen declaration on file at all, that is not one finding about one document, it is a finding about whether your supplier approval and monitoring procedure is operating. The gap between a B and a C can be six minors. A supplier file review is one of the few parts of the audit capable of producing that many in an hour.

The unannounced bill you cannot forecast

The numbers plants post to each other are blunter than the ones on price lists. On the IFSQN forum, a UK grower described being billed for an unannounced BRC audit where the auditor was flown in at short notice: "The flight was £3000 as it was last minute and apparently all they could get," with 2.5 days of travel time charged on top, leaving them to "pick up 1.5 days BRC audit for nearly £7000" even after splitting the expenses with another grower.

That is the structural problem with unannounced audits as a cost. You cannot schedule around them, you cannot batch them with another standard's audit to share the travel, and you are paying for your document position on a day you did not choose. The plants that handle unannounced audits cheaply are not the ones with better documents on audit day. They are the ones whose documents are in the same state every day.

The 28 days afterwards

After any BRCGS audit you have 28 calendar days to close non-conformities to root cause and submit evidence the certification body accepts, and your certificate is not issued until that evidence is reviewed. Issuing can take up to 42 days from the audit.

For a supplier documentation finding, closing to root cause means producing the missing certificates, which means chasing suppliers who did not respond the first three times, inside a fixed window, while also writing the procedural fix that explains why it will not recur. This is the expensive part that never appears as a fee. It is two to three weeks of a QA manager's attention spent on documents that could have been collected at any point in the preceding year.

The hours, set beside the fees

Use four to eight hours a week as a working figure for what certificate chasing takes at a plant with 50 to 200 suppliers: building the list, reading expiry dates off scans, emailing contacts who have changed jobs, re-emailing them. Over 45 working weeks that is 180 to 360 hours. Multiply by your own fully loaded hourly cost for a QA manager and you will usually find the chasing costs more per year than the audit does, and unlike the audit it buys nothing you can show an auditor except the documents themselves.

Set that beside the published range for software in this category, which runs from a few pounds a month for a basic app to £250 a month and up for a full system. Certly's Starter plan is £149 a month, with a 14-day free trial and no card at the start. We are not going to pretend that arithmetic is dramatic. It is simply a smaller number than a second audit in the same year.

What a tracking system changes, and what it does not

Certly is a certificate tracking and reminder system. It holds your suppliers and the certificate types each one owes you, stores the uploaded documents against the supplier and type, and computes a status for every slot: current, expiring soon, expired, or missing. Alert thresholds default to 90, 60 and 30 days before expiry, and you can set them per certificate type or plant-wide, because an audit certificate and an allergen declaration do not need the same lead time.

From there it chases. Automated email sequences go to the supplier contact as a certificate approaches expiry or lapses, each one carrying a single-use, expiring upload link the supplier can use without an account or a login, and each send is logged with its delivery status so a bounce reads as a bounce rather than as contact made. You can import your existing spreadsheet with column mapping and carry the expiry dates you already recorded across, so the 100-supplier list you maintain today does not have to be retyped. Supplier uploads land as awaiting review rather than counting as on file, so you can accept a document or send it back with a reason, and you can stamp a certificate as reviewed and have that sign-off appear on the audit PDF, which is the proof of review the spreadsheet column used to give you. On audit day there is a single status screen, a PDF export, and an audit pack ZIP of the documents themselves. Where a document will stay lapsed while you wait on the supplier, you can record the risk decision against it.

What it does not do is verify that a certificate is genuine or guarantee that you comply with anything. Certly tracks and reminds, and the dashboard and the exported PDF both say so. The cost it removes is specific and narrow: the hours, and the category of finding where the document existed somewhere and nobody knew it had expired.