New in IMS-Audit Cloud: October 2026
Quite a lot has been added to IMS-Audit Cloud since our September overview – above all around the audit programme, conducting audits and actions. On top of that, the quality manual is now available to all companies, read confirmations work without a user account, and the management review supports further standards. Here is an overview of what is new.
Print the audit programme for signature
In many organisations the audit programme has to be approved and signed. The print button in audit programme planning now produces a landscape report for exactly that: a header with the company logo, four key figures (audits in total, planned, in progress, completed), one line per audit with area, audit type, standard and lead auditor, and month columns with markers in the status colour. By default the printout shows the start year and the two following years side by side – matching a three-year audit programme; a switch brings back the single-year view. At the foot of the last page there is a signature block “Prepared · Reviewed · Approved”.
Clause coverage: which clauses were audited where?
The new evaluation under “Evaluations & reports” answers a question every certification auditor asks: which clauses of the standard were audited internally at which site during the year – and where are the gaps? The matrix shows the clauses of the standard in the rows and your sites in the columns: green for audited, yellow for planned or in progress, red for a gap. Clicking a cell lists the audits with their evidence, such as “3 of 5 questions rated”; the printout delivers the matrix as a PDF.
Your existing audits count without any rework, provided the question catalogue is structured by the clauses of the standard. If imported audits lack a standard, you can assign it to several audits at once in the audit overview – the new quick filter “Without standard” shows the candidates.
Scheduling with Outlook
If you have connected Outlook in your profile, you no longer need to hunt for dates:
- Date suggestion when creating an audit: the cloud queries the free/busy times of the audit team, and of auditees and contacts if you wish, and shows for the next six weeks the first time slot per working day in which everyone is free. In audit programme planning the suggestion is available directly on every audit without a date.
- Actions in the calendar: the planned end date of an action appears automatically as an all-day entry in the owner’s Outlook calendar and moves along when it is postponed. Once the action is done, the entry disappears.
- Calendar file and button in the action email: owners without an Outlook connection – external ones included – receive a calendar file with the action email and an “Add to calendar” button that also works on a phone.
On the tablet: photo straight onto the question
In the audit question catalogue, the “Edit question” dialogue on a tablet has a Take photo button: it opens the rear camera, and the photo is stored as a document on the question, named after the question number, date and time – instead of twenty files called “image.jpg”. The dialogue is also wide and in two columns now, with the question on the left and rating, answer and documents on the right. It fits on a notebook and an iPad without scrolling.
Find things faster: search with Ctrl+K
The top bar has a search field across audits, actions, documents, test equipment and people. From two characters onwards a list of hits grouped by area appears, and one click takes you straight to the record. Ctrl+K puts the cursor in the field from any page.
Completed means completed
Completed audits and completed or discarded actions are now read-only – only the company administrator can reopen them. Viewing, filtering, searching and printing remain possible. If you complete an audit that still has open actions, you see the list and decide whether to close them along with the audit. And for audits that did not take place there is a new status, “Cancelled”: the audit remains documented but never counts as carried out.
More new features around the audit
- Question pool in the master catalogue editor: take over questions or whole sections from other catalogues by drag & drop – as an independent copy including translations.
- Print the audit schedule: the schedule as a landscape PDF, with times, topics, clause references, auditors and participants for each audit day.
- Escalation contact per site: a fixed email address, such as that of the plant management, receives a copy at the escalation levels you choose – visible or as a blind copy.
- Link instead of file: on audits, actions, 8D reports and test equipment you can store a link to SharePoint or OneDrive instead of uploading a file. The cloud stores only the address; the permissions of your storage location apply.
Quality manual now available to all companies
With the quality manual you write your manual directly in the program and maintain it chapter by chapter: each chapter has its own revision and its own approval, the revision index maintains itself, and a review interval reminds you of the regular check. You link referenced documents from document control to each chapter, and the complete printout delivers a cover page, table of contents and revision index. With the read link the whole workforce can read the approved version – without a user account and without a licence.
You will find the module in the sidebar under “Management system”; it is available to all users with read permission for document control. More on the Quality manual page.
Document control: read confirmation without a user account
Read confirmations can now be addressed to all employees, not just program users: you put the distribution list together from the people in your master data, by department if you wish. Anyone without a user account receives an email with a link to the document portal and confirms there. Reminders go out automatically to anyone outstanding, and the new printout “Evidence of read confirmations” shows across all revisions who confirmed when and by which channel.
In addition, a controlled document can point to a SharePoint or OneDrive link instead of a file – approval, revisions, review dates and read confirmations work as usual.
Management review: four more standards
Alongside ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and ISO 13485 you can now also select IATF 16949, EN 9100, ISO 50001 and ISO/IEC 27001. Each standard brings the inputs and outputs of its clause 9.3; with several standards the sections are merged.
For IATF 16949 this adds, among other things, cost of poor quality, product conformity, manufacturing feasibility assessments, warranty, customer scorecards and field failures. The section “Cost of poor quality” fills itself automatically from the additional costs recorded on your complaints – external, internal and from supplier complaints, with previous period, trend arrow and the five most expensive cases. EN 9100 adds on-time delivery performance, ISO 50001 energy performance and ISO/IEC 27001 information security risk assessment and treatment. Existing reviews remain unchanged. More on the Management review page.
All new features are available automatically – no update is required. You will find every single change in the change log, or see what is new live in a meeting.