Certificates

The position

The position is simple: certificates are available upon request. That sentence is the whole certification statement on this site, and it appears in the same form on every page. It means that a buyer who needs documents for an order should ask for them in the inquiry, and the supplier's reply should contain the current documents or a clear statement of what is available.

This restraint exists because the certificate evidence in the sources is not citable as current. Some certificate photographs in the source record have passed their shown validity dates, some certificate graphics are logos rather than documents, and the certificate lists across sources use different scopes and counts. In that situation, naming a certificate on a public page would present as current something that has not been verified as current, and this site does not do that.

What to ask for

An inquiry that needs documents should name the categories first, then ask which certificates are available upon request for those categories, and then ask for the current documents themselves. Ask for the document, not for a logo or a badge: a logo graphic does not carry a holder, a scope, or a validity period, and it cannot be checked against a channel's requirements.

When you receive documents, check them yourself: the holder name, the scope, and the validity period, against your own requirements and against the categories in your order. This site gives you the question to ask; the checking itself belongs to the buyer, because only the buyer knows the channel's exact requirements.

• Name the categories for which documents are needed.
• Ask which certificates are available upon request for those categories.
• Ask for the current documents, not a logo or a badge.
• Check holder, scope, and validity period against your own requirements.
• Keep the documents with the order thread for audit.

What this page does not do

This page does not list certificate names, numbers, issuers, scopes, or validity periods, and it does not reproduce any certificate photograph or logo as proof. Those omissions are intentional: each omitted item is an item that could not be verified as current from the sources available, and omitting it is more honest than publishing it with a silent caveat.

If a future current document becomes available, the correct action is to update this page with a verified citation — holder, scope, and validity period as shown on the document — rather than to add a name without the document behind it. Until then, the request route is the certification route.

Asking for documents for a mixed range

A mixed range needs a documents question per family, not one blanket question for the whole order. Compression legwear, gloves and sleeves, heated pieces, and diabetic categories may each have different documents available, and the inquiry should ask per family so the reply can be checked family by family. A single blanket question returns a single blanket answer that cannot be checked against any one family.

The buyer should also keep the documents with the order thread, family by family, so that a later reorder or a later audit can trace which document covered which family. That filing habit costs little at ordering time and saves a great deal of rework if a channel later asks for the documents behind a past order. The inquiry page's checklist already asks per category; this page adds the reason: documents are only useful when they can be matched to the family they cover.

Related categories on this site