# Internal audit

> An internal audit is a planned, independent review by the organisation of its own quality management system and technical activities, verifying that procedures are followed and effective and feeding findings into corrective action.

- Source: https://amps.global/glossary/internal-audit/
- Type: Glossary
- Published: 2026-09-05
- Tags: quality, accreditation

## Key facts

- Required by ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 17020 and ISO/IEC 17025; the auditor must be independent of the activity audited
- A vertical audit follows one job end to end: enquiry, quote, personnel, equipment, procedure, report, invoice
- Findings become NCRs and CAPAs; results are input to management review
- Accreditation assessors read the internal audit records first

Also known as: internal quality audit, QMS audit, vertical audit.

## The vertical audit in an NDT company

Pick a completed job and ask for every record: who did it and were they certified at the time, which instruments and were they in calibration, which procedure revision, does the report match the template and the acceptance criteria, was the client sent the right revision, was it invoiced.

## Internal audits and AMPS

That vertical trail is what AMPS keeps together: the job page holds the report, photos, documents, timesheets and costs; the history feature shows who did what and when; personnel and equipment pages hold the certificates that were current on the day. Documents saved through AMPS live in your own OneDrive, SharePoint or Google Drive, not on AMPS servers, so an existing QA folder structure keeps working unchanged and everything stays yours if you ever stop using AMPS.

## Related pages

- [Audit trail](https://amps.global/glossary/audit-trail/)
- [Corrective and preventive action (CAPA)](https://amps.global/glossary/corrective-and-preventive-action/)
- [Managing NDT jobs on AMPS](https://amps.global/case-studies/01-ndt-jobs-and-assets/)

## Sources

- [Internal audit on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_audit)
- [ISO 9001:2015 at iso.org](https://www.iso.org/standard/62085.html)