“All of Britain’s leading accounting firms have failed to hit quality targets set by their regulator for auditing company books for the second year in a row, with Grant Thornton and PwC singled out to join KPMG under tougher supervision.”

This headline is chilling as it says the audit function that businesses used to verify their financial health is broken. It is comparable to ISO accreditation bodies saying the top certification bodies in the world are not performing according to their performance indicators and the result is putting the certification process at risk.

Section 5.1.1 section c) of the 2015 version of ISO 9001 states Top management shall demonstrate leadership and commitment to the quality management system by: ensuring the integration of the quality management system requirements into the organization’s business processes. This article opens our eyes as to why section c) was added to the 2015 standard.

It has always been my opinion that the financial function is a critical process which has a major impact on a company’s ability to meet customer requirements. Cash flow and financial planning are critical to securing vendor services, paying employees, and infrastructure maintenance that the support the product realization processes.

The financial function of most organizations is not normally included in the ISO 9001 Quality Management System processes. The excuse has always been that they are audited by the large audit firms such as those listed in the headline. The implication was that the audits were far more stringent thus making it unnecessary to include them in the Quality Management System. Fortunately, the ISO 9001 committee saw a need to consider all of the business processes. The success of an organization is dependent on the totality of the processes. Not just one.

Is your finance department included in the Quality Management System? Should it be? The risk approach to management would certainly say it should be.