Accreditation Management Software for Maritime Registers

When an application is approved, the member receives a seal: a short code linked to a public verification page on your register. With the seal widget, included on the Free plan, the member can show the seal on their own website, and the link can go on reports, proposals and email signatures.

Anyone who opens the page sees the answer that holds at that moment. It shows valid while the membership is active or in its grace period, with the member's name, tier, member-since date and good-standing date. It shows not valid when the membership has lapsed or been suspended, or when the code has been revoked. The page is never served from a cache, and every check is recorded with its outcome.

If a seal is copied or misused, staff rotate the code: the old one stops verifying and a new one is issued. A body that prints the verification link as a QR code on a plaque, a certificate or a survey report gives clients the same check from a phone, without calling the secretariat.

Every certifying body has its own procedure, usually written into a statute or regulation: an office check for completeness, a technical review of qualifications, references and a decision by a committee or council. Guild lets you define that procedure as up to eight review stages. An application in review sits in exactly one stage, advances step by step and can be approved only from the last one; an application that is plainly ineligible can be rejected at any point.

Reviewers are assigned per application, and a form can carry default reviewers. A reviewer sees only the applications assigned to them, records a review against a checklist (identity, qualifications, documents, references, fee tier) and checks each document. When something is missing, the application goes back to the applicant with a request for information and, once answered, resumes at the stage it left.

The decision closes the loop. Approval creates the membership, copies the applicant's qualifications and documents to the member record, issues the seal, invites the new member to the portal and emails the outcome; rejection emails the applicant with your message. Reviewers use staff seats, and a custom role such as a vetting committee can be limited to the applications it needs.

Admission is the start, not the end. A register that clients trust has to reflect who is still qualified and still in good standing. In Guild each member's certificates sit in a qualifications register: STCW, MCA, RYA, ENG1 and national licences from a built-in catalogue, plus the types your body adds, each with a document and an expiry date. Members upload renewed certificates from their portal, and staff verify or reject them from the register.

The register has tabs for certificates expiring within 90 days, already expired, waiting to be checked, and all. Your team is notified at 90, 30 and 7 days before expiry and on the expiry day. Membership status drives the seal: when a membership lapses after its grace period, or staff suspend it, the verification page stops showing it as valid.

What the public sees is controlled field by field. Members choose to be listed and consent to a public profile; the association defines its own member fields, such as survey categories, licence class or areas covered, with visibility rules, and can require approval before edits to selected fields are published. Import from a spreadsheet or Wild Apricot with a dry run and a 24-hour undo, and export everything in open formats on every plan.