Automated chase emails for supplier certificates

Nobody in a QA office decides not to chase a supplier. It slips because chasing is not one task, it is dozens of small ones spread across a year, each attached to a different expiry date, a different contact, and a different certificate type.

The usual arrangement is a spreadsheet of expiry dates, a set of calendar reminders, and a folder of sent items. It works until the week you are covering a line trial, or the contact at the ingredient supplier has left and nobody told you, or the reminder fires and you make a note to deal with it on Friday. Then an allergen declaration or a CoA sits a month past its date, and the out-of-date certificate on file becomes a finding at the next audit, with a corrective action to close out and, depending on the severity, a re-audit to pay for.

The part that costs the most time is not deciding who to chase. The dates already tell you that. It is writing the same polite email for the fifth time, attaching nothing useful, explaining again which document you need and in what form, then remembering a fortnight later that they never replied.

Certly is built to take that specific job off your desk. It is a certificate tracking and reminder system: it watches expiry dates, sends the chase to the contact held against the supplier, gives that contact somewhere to put the file, and keeps the record of what was asked for and what happened to it.

Certly tracks and reminds on certificate expiry. It does not verify certificate authenticity and it does not guarantee regulatory compliance, and that statement sits permanently on the dashboard and on the PDF export rather than buried in terms.

In practical terms, a chase sequence gets the document to you and records that it arrived. Reading it, checking the scope and the issuing body, and deciding whether the supplier stays on your approved supplier list is still QA work, and should be. What the automation removes is the part of that work that is purely clerical: knowing what is due, asking for it, asking again, and keeping the record of both.

The automatic sequence is also scoped to certificates that are expiring soon or already lapsed. A certificate type you have ticked as required but never received a document for sits on the dashboard as missing, and the first request for it goes out when you click chase now, using the same template and logged the same way. That is deliberate rather than hidden: a document that has never existed is usually a conversation with the buyer as much as an email to the supplier.

The sequence is only as good as the contact details behind it. A supplier record with a general info@ address will be chased at that address. If the chase log shows failures, the fix is a current contact, or the copied link sent to someone who will act on it, not more reminders into the same inbox.

Chasing stops when it should, too. Archiving a supplier you no longer buy from keeps its certificate records and its chase history for the auditor, and stops its reminders going out. On the supplier page you can also erase a contact's name and email on their own, behind a confirmation that spells out what is removed and what stays, which stops any unused upload link already sent to them from working at the same moment.

Certly is in waitlist mode today, so the honest framing is intent rather than results: this is what the product is built to do, for single-site plants where one QA team owns the certificate file. Your team signs in with email and password. Suppliers never sign in at all.