Procurement & finance
Certification
The formal confirmation by a named authority — the engineer, the project manager — that work has been done or a milestone achieved. On a service contract it replaces the goods received note as the receipt leg of the match.
Certification is an act, not a signature. It should rest on evidence: the deliverable, the test result, the issued package. A certificate given because the invoice arrived and the relationship is good is not a control; it is a courtesy with financial consequences.
And the certifier should be named in the contract. "Whoever is available" is not a certification authority, and an auditor will say so.