Who this is for: Audit Administrators.
One switch controls this for the whole company: Enable Autogenerate Reference, under Settings → System Settings → Audit Settings → General Settings.
State | What happens |
On | The system produces a structured reference automatically. This covers audits, findings and root cause analyses |
Off | References are entered by hand |
Audits already created keep the setting they were created with. Changing the switch affects what happens next; it does not renumber anything that already exists, and it does not start generating references for records that were given manual ones.
The template reference is the stem for everything downstream: audit record references, then finding and root cause references all derive from it.
One exception: on uploaded external audit reports, the Audit Reference is always editable, whatever this setting says. That is deliberate — an external report already has its own reference from the body that issued it, and you will want to match it.
Switch it off deliberately, not by default. Manual references are the right choice where your own numbering scheme is already embedded in a quality manual or a certification file. Everywhere else, generated references are what make a finding code traceable back to its audit and its template without anyone having to maintain a register.
Related: 3.5 Setting the template's location(s), version and reference code · 7.3 Understanding finding reference codes