These terms sell you nothing. They set out what a consultant can promise and what it cannot.

When these terms apply

These terms take effect on September 29, 2026, and that is also the date of the last update. They cover every visit to wac.us.org from that day. An engagement letter you sign with us for actual consulting work sits on top of these terms. Where the two disagree, the signed letter wins, because it was written for your job and these were not.

Who you are dealing with

The site is run by Wac, trading at wac.us.org under the name WAC Standards Studio. The postal address is 1325 6TH AVE, SEATTLE, WA 98101, SEATTLE, WA, United States. Post, phone and email all reach the same small studio. No reseller or call center sits between you and the person who reads your inquiry.

What the site gives you, and what it does not

The site describes five consulting engagements: ISO 9001 implementation, a two-day ISO 9001 gap assessment, certification audit readiness, documented information and internal audit and management review. It carries a scope builder that turns six choices into an indicative number of consulting days, an inquiry form, and a support chat read by a person.

It does not certify anyone. WAC is not a certification body, and under ISO/IEC 17021-1 the body that certifies your system may not have consulted on it. Nothing on this site is a certificate, a registration, an accreditation or an audit opinion. The articles and sample ledgers describe how we work. They are not legal advice, and they are not a reading of your particular system, which we have not seen.

We do not claim any accreditation, registration or auditor credential on these pages. If a page ever seems to say otherwise, it is wrong and we want to know.

Inquiry only. Nothing is bought here

No product or service is sold or paid for on this site. There is no cart, no checkout and no payment step, and we never ask for card details through a form or the chat. If anyone does, it is not us.

The scope builder shows days as an estimate for scoping. It is arithmetic on your answers, not a quote, and it is not binding on either side. Audit days are a separate matter: the certification body sets those itself under IAF MD 5, and our figure does not include them.

An inquiry becomes an order in four steps. You send the form or call. We reply, usually with questions, and hold a scoping call. We send a written engagement letter naming the standard, the sites, the deliverables, the fee basis and the dates. Work starts only when that letter is signed by both parties. Before the signature, either of us can walk away owing nothing.

How fees are set

All fees are in US dollars (USD). Each engagement has its own basis, stated on its page and in the engagement letter:

• ISO 9001 implementation: a fixed fee agreed after a scoping call.
• Gap assessment: a fixed fee per site.
• Certification audit readiness: a day rate for an agreed number of days.
• Documented information: per document set, quoted after we have reviewed what you already have.
• Internal audit and management review: per audit cycle.

What moves a fee is almost always one of these: the standard chosen (ISO 13485:2016 carries more mandatory procedures than ISO 9001:2015), the number of people in scope, the number of sites, and how much of a system already exists. A lapsed or failed certified system is usually cheaper to rebuild than nothing at all. A change to scope after the letter is signed is priced in writing before the extra work is done. We do not invoice for work you did not agree to.

Travel outside the Seattle area, if an engagement needs it, is stated as its own line in the letter. It is never folded silently into a day rate.

The engagement guarantee

We will not promise you a pass. Nobody honest can. The certification body's auditor decides whether a nonconformity is major or minor, and a consultant who guarantees the outcome is either selling you something else or has not read ISO/IEC 17021-1.

What we do guarantee is the thing we control. Every finding we hand you, in a gap assessment, a mock audit or an internal audit, is written as one ledger line: the clause, the evidence we saw, the gap, a named owner and a due date. If a line we delivered is missing any of those five parts, or cites a clause that does not say what we claimed it says, tell us. We rewrite that line without charge, and if the error changed the advice, we rewrite the advice with it.

Two more commitments sit alongside it. We will not write a procedure for a process you do not run. And the ledger, the documents and the records we produce are yours to keep after we leave, in formats your people can open and edit without us.

What you may not do here

Read, print and share anything on the site for your own organisation's use. You may not:

• copy our sample ledgers, checklists or page text into a product you sell, or pass them off as a certification body's output;
• send the form or the chat anything unlawful, abusive, or another person's personal data without their permission;
• probe, scrape at volume, overload or try to get past any part of the site that is not linked from its public pages;
• use automated tools to submit inquiries, or fill the hidden form fields meant to catch them;
• pretend to be WAC, or to speak for us, in any message to a third party.

Who owns the words and pictures

The text, the sample ledgers, the photographs, the layout, the WAC Standards Studio name and the logo belong to Wac or are used under licence. Quoting a sentence with a link back is fine. Reproducing a page, a photograph or the logo needs written permission from us first.

ISO, IEC and IAF documents are the property of their publishers. We cite clause numbers and titles. We do not reproduce the standards, and you should buy your own copy from an authorised seller. Documents we write for you under a signed engagement letter are covered by that letter, which gives you the right to use and change them inside your organisation.

What the site does not warrant

The site and everything on it are provided as is. We keep the clause references current with the editions named on each page, but standards are revised, and a page can fall behind a new edition or an amendment for a while. The scope builder output is an estimate on your inputs and nothing more. We do not warrant that the site is always available, free of error, or suitable for a particular decision you make without speaking to us.

Nothing on this page limits a right you have under a law that cannot be excluded by contract.

The limit of liability

Using the site is free, and to the extent the law allows, WAC is not liable for loss that comes from relying on the site alone: a delayed certification, a lost contract, or a decision made on a scope builder figure. For paid work, liability is set in the engagement letter and is capped at the fees paid for the engagement the claim concerns. We are not liable for a certification body's decisions, its fees, its audit days or its schedule. None of this excludes liability for fraud, or for anything else the law of WA does not allow to be excluded.

When access can be withdrawn

We may block an address, a device or a chat token from the site, the form or the chat, without notice, if it breaks the rules above, floods us with automated submissions, or harasses anyone. An engagement letter can be ended by either party on the notice it states. Work done up to that point is paid on the agreed basis, and you keep every ledger line and document delivered by then.

Governing law and courts

These terms, and any dispute about the site, run under the law of WA, United States. Disputes are heard in the courts of SEATTLE. Before anyone files anything, write to us at the address below. Most disagreements about a consulting job turn out to be about one line in a scope, and a phone call fixes them faster than a court.

How changes are announced

When these terms change, the new version goes up on this page with a new effective date in the header and in the first section. A change that affects a live engagement does not apply to it until we have told the client in writing and they have agreed. We do not change terms retroactively for work already done.

Accessibility statement

This site is built to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 at level AA. Every page has a skip link, one main heading and a visible focus ring in the accent colour. The navigation works by keyboard: the Services panel opens with Enter and closes with Escape. Buttons and links are at least 44 pixels tall. Text reflows down to a 320-pixel screen without sideways scrolling. The running marquee strips stop moving when your system asks for reduced motion, and they pause under a pointer, under keyboard focus, or when tapped.

Known limits, stated plainly. The sample ledger tables are wide, and on a small phone they scroll inside their own box. A screen reader reads them row by row, which is correct but slow. Photographs carry short descriptions; none of them carries information that is not also in the text. The scope builder announces its result as it updates, and in some screen readers that is chatty.

If something on the site blocks you, email [email protected] or call (206) 464-3067 and say which page and what happened. We will fix it, or send you the same content in another format, such as a plain text or a printed copy by post.

Questions about these terms

Write to Wac, trading as WAC Standards Studio, 1325 6TH AVE, SEATTLE, WA 98101, United States. Email [email protected]. Phone (206) 464-3067. For questions about personal data, the privacy policy and its data request section apply, and the cookie policy covers what the browser stores.