What the Verified audit checks
The badge is what an audit produces, not what a fee buys. A person works through every check below on your business, one at a time, and writes down what they find — and a business can fail. The list is published in advance so that nobody is ever audited against criteria they could not read first.
Every check, and the work behind it
Each entry says what the auditor does and why the check is on the list at all. The reason is published with the check because a check with no reason attached is the first one softened when it is inconvenient.
- Current certificate of insurance
Ask for the certificate, check the dates cover today, and check the named insured matches the trading name.
Why it is on the list: It is the item clients and venues genuinely care about. - Registered business, matching the trading name
Find the registration and check the legal name against the name they trade under.
Why it is on the list: A trading name with nothing behind it is the shape most complaints start from. - Portfolio watched, not just linked
Watch the reel and at least one full piece. Check it matches the work they claim to do.
Why it is on the list: A reel that does not match the claim is the failure a client cannot check before booking. - Phone called, answered by a human
Call the number on the listing. A person has to answer, or return the call.
Why it is on the list: A number that reaches nobody is how a booking goes wrong on the day. - Two past clients contacted
Ask for two recent clients and speak to both.
Why it is on the list: The only check that hears from somebody who was not paid to say it. - Years trading, and no pattern of unresolved complaints
Check how long they have traded and look for complaints nobody answered.
Why it is on the list: One unhappy client is normal. A run of them nobody replied to is not.
This list is generated from the same one the auditor works from. There is no second copy of it, so it cannot say one thing here and another thing in the room.
Businesses fail this, and that is the point
If everybody who pays gets the badge it is a sticker, and the trade knows within a month. That is precisely why a badge on a directory is usually worth nothing. Here, the audit is the product and the badge is only its output.
What follows is a worked example, not a real audit — nobody is named and nothing here happened. It is computed by the same code that decides a real outcome and worded by the same notice a real applicant is sent, so it shows what failing produces rather than describing it.
The audit is finished, and it did not pass.
Somebody went through the published checks on your business one at a time and wrote down what they found. That work is what you bought, and all of it is below.
The fee is not returned. It paid for the audit, and the audit was carried out. It is also the reason the badge is worth carrying: an audit that refunds a failure is an audit that quietly stops failing anybody.
None of this is permanent. Every finding below can be fixed, the checks do not change between audits, and when you have put them right you can ask us to look again.
- Current certificate of insurance — It is the item clients and venues genuinely care about.
On these results no badge is awarded, and paying for the audit does not change that.
The findings are what the fee bought. A business that cannot currently earn the badge leaves knowing exactly what a pass needs, in the same words the list above uses.
The fee buys the audit, not the badge
One to two hours of somebody’s attention goes into a single audit: a certificate read, a registration looked up, a reel watched, a phone answered, two past clients spoken to. That work is what is charged for, and it happens whether it ends in a badge or in a list of findings.
So a failed audit is not refunded. The reasoning is in the notice above and it is worth stating plainly: an audit that returns the money on a failure is an audit that quietly stops failing anybody, because the cheapest way to avoid refunds is to pass everyone. That is the sticker this exists not to be.
No price appears on this page, and nothing here can be bought today. If you would like your business audited against this list, write to [email protected].
The badge runs out after 12 months
A badge is current for 12 months from the day its audit finished, and then the audit is run again. Re-checking is real work that genuinely recurs, which is what makes it the one honest recurring charge here.
The strongest check on the list is the one that goes stale on a schedule. An insurance certificate a year out of date is exactly what this badge exists to catch, so a badge that outlived its audit would assert the opposite of what it was bought to assert.
- An expired badge is not a failed audit. A business that passed did pass, and nothing about that is retracted. The badge has stopped saying anything about today, which is a different sentence entirely.
- A finished audit with a check nobody reached is not a pass. Anything the auditor did not record is treated as unchecked, never as satisfied — which is how the insurance check would otherwise become optional the first time an audit ran long.
It never moves anybody up a list
A badge may appear on a profile. It may not reorder a directory, and it does not.
Verified above unverified, in any sort order, is paid position wearing a badge — and paid position is the thing this network exists not to sell. So nothing that decides who is matched to a request, and nothing that orders the directory, reads the audit at all: not the badge, not the audit date, not a stored result. A test fails if any of them starts to.
The date is the likelier breach now that a badge has one, which is why it is guarded by name. “Most recently verified first” reads as a freshness sort rather than a paid one, and it is the same ordering bought the same way with a better excuse. See About for how matching is decided, and Security for what is held about you.