Everything around the examination
Writing the questions is the part a certifying body wants to spend its time on. This is the other ninety per cent: who may sit, when, what it costs, what happened in the room, and who decided.
Who may sit, decided by you, recorded properly
Eligibility is modelled, not a free-text form. You define requirements of five kinds — a credential or license, an education qualification, supervised practice hours against a minimum, a training or CE completion, or a declaration the candidate signs — each with its own label, detail and order. Requirements are retired rather than deleted, so a decision made under an old rule stays explicable years later.
A candidate applies and their application stores the requirements as they were on the day they applied. Changing your rules next year cannot retroactively invalidate a pending application. Answers are structured per requirement, documents attach per requirement rather than as one undifferentiated bundle, and your reviewers can request a specific missing document against a specific requirement, with the request tracked to fulfilment.
Approval is time-boxed: a decision carries an approved-until date derived from your program’s eligibility validity period. And the whole thing is optional — a program set to open lets anyone register and never shows a reviewer a queue.
Windows, appointments and seats
An examination window is a dated period with a delivery mode, an optional seat capacity and an optional registration deadline. Inside it you publish appointments: a start instant, a duration, a capacity and a place. Times are stored as UTC instants and displayed in a named zone, so an appointment at 09:00 Eastern renders correctly on both sides of a daylight-saving boundary — storing an offset instead is right until March and wrong afterwards, and the cost of that error is a candidate arriving an hour late for an examination they cannot retake for ninety days.
Capacity is enforced by the database on both the way a seat is taken and the way it is moved, because a rule enforced only on insert is not a rule — rescheduling moves a seat by update. What it costs a candidate to change their mind is a policy you set, tiered by how much notice they gave, and the amount is frozen at the moment the change is decided so that editing the policy next month cannot restate what somebody was charged.
Your account, your name, your price list
Fees are charged on your own connected payment account. You set an examination fee, a renewal fee, a late renewal fee, a reinstatement fee and an application fee; a candidate sees every one of them that applies before committing to a seat, and a fee you have not set is not shown at all rather than displayed as an empty row.
A seat is created the moment a candidate registers and counted against capacity immediately, then confirmed when payment settles — so two people cannot pay for the last chair. A program whose examination fee is zero settles through the same path, with the same ledger entry, rather than a special case that skips the record.
Released when you say, disputed properly
Results are released on your schedule: immediately on marking, or held until someone at your body has looked. Score reports can break the result down by content area if your program opts in. A candidate may challenge a specific question; you decide the challenge and what happens to every score it touched.
Nothing is voided by a button. A concern about a sitting is raised in words the candidate reads, they have a window to answer, you decide with a reason, and they may appeal to somebody at your body who took no part in the first decision. Every act on a result or a credential carries the name of the person who did it.
Roles, workspaces and one queue that matters
Owners and administrators run the body, examiners run sittings and record results, contacts read. Somebody who wears more than one hat switches workspace from the sidebar rather than holding two logins. Every queue that needs a decision — eligibility applications, evidence requests, integrity concerns, payment reviews, CE audits — appears on one overview, and each card opens the console that settles it.
See it against your own program
Tell us how many candidates you certify and what you run today. You will get a written quote against the published rates — not a discovery call before a number.