Quality Control Template for Excel (Free Download)

A project delivered on time and within budget isn’t a success unless it has met the quality expectations of its stakeholders. To ensure that your project is meeting quality standards, you’ll need to monitor and control it just as you do for time and cost. Download our free quality control template for Excel to make sure you produce only quality deliverables.

What Is Quality Control?

Quality control (QC) is a process of ensuring that a product meets quality standards. It requires that the whole company creates an environment where everyone strives for the best quality product possible. Part of quality control involves the training of a company’s employees, creating benchmarks for product quality and testing those products to make sure they achieve those benchmarks without a statistically significant variation.

One way to do this is by establishing well-defined controls. Using our free quality control template helps to standardize production and how issues related to quality are dealt with. Part of this is defining which personnel are responsible for what tasks and that they’re trained well to perform these tasks at the highest level to avoid faulty work.

Why You Need a Quality Control Template

Using our free quality control template for Excel is a standardized way to establish and maintain production standards. It helps you identify imperfections in your product and establish a response to fix those issues promptly. It details quality assurance measures and methods of accountability.

Quality control is essential to safeguard a company’s reputation by preventing the production of products that aren’t reliable. By producing quality products, a company increases the trust of its customers, which produces loyalty and retains customers.

By using our free quality control template, you’re making sure that your company is using evidence-based data and research to deliver quality products rather than anecdotal observations. The testing that is part of quality control validates precision and accuracy, improves quality and reduces risks. It’ll also help gain production efficiencies and as noted above, lead to customer loyalty and retention.

However, a quality control template is only the first step. Next, you need project management software to manage the work. ProjectManager is award-winning project and portfolio management software that takes your template and turns it into an actionable plan.

Use our powerful Gantt charts to link all four types of task dependencies to avoid costly delays and filter for the critical path to identify essential tasks. The plan is shared across multiple project views, including kanban boards, task lists, calendar and sheet views, allowing team members to use the tools they’re most comfortable with. Share files, log notes and all views will update simultaneously in real time to foster cross-team collaboration. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.

Gantt chart with quality control plan on it — Make detailed plans and account for quality control measures with Gantt charts. Learn more

Who Should Use Our Quality Control Template?

Our free quality control template is for teams of any size and can be adapted to many industries outside of manufacturing. It’s used by the project manager or, if the company has one, a quality manager who’s responsible for identifying and remedying any quality issues.

During the execution, monitoring and controlling phase of the project, some projects will have dedicated team members who take on the responsibility of testing and approving deliverables. These team members are designated as quality assurance, control or quality experts. If the project doesn’t have people in these specific roles, then the responsibility will fall on the shoulders of the team or project manager.

What’s Included in Our Quality Control Template?

Once you’ve downloaded our free quality control template, you’ll find a fully customizable Excel document with the basics of quality control. However, you can make this document your own by adding your logo and including more or fewer columns, depending on your project and procedures. Here are the included sections in the free quality control template for Excel.

Issue: The first column is where the quality issue is noted when identified. This can be any type of imperfection found when tested, such as a defect, deficiency or significant variation in what’s expected of a product.
Description: The issue is just a topic, but the description will go into detail. It’ll explain why the product is or isn’t doing that doesn’t meet quality standards.
Imperfections: A product can have an imperfection, which means that there is something wrong with the product. It isn’t adhering to the quality standards that were set up at the beginning of the project. There can be any number of imperfections and there’s a pull-down menu to quantify those imperfections from one to 10.
Identified By: This is the name of the team member who identified the quality issue. They’re not likely to be the person who will be tasked with fixing it.
To Be Fixed By: Here you’ll note the team member who’s responsible for resolving the issue. This could be a machinist who needs to fix something on the production line or the product might need to go back to the team that designed it.
Priority: Not all problems are equally important. To determine if the problem is important enough to work on or if it’s very important and needs addressing immediately, the template has a pulldown menu for priority from low to critical.
Status: When a problem has been identified its status is open and that means it’s being investigated or getting fixed. When its status is closed that means it’s either not worth addressing or has been fixed.
Date Open: When the imperfection is first identified, the quality issue is opened and that date is recorded here.
Date Closed: When the quality issue has been resolved, that closed date is recorded here.
Notes: If there’s information that the previous columns didn’t address, then they can be added here for context or anything else.

Related Quality Management Templates

The quality control template is part of your larger quality management plan. We have other free templates that you can use to help you with your quality management plan.

Our site has over 100 free project management templates for Excel and Word that cover all aspects of running a project. Here are a few that are related to the quality management process.

Risk Tracking Template

Part of maintaining quality is being aware of any risks. Use this free risk tracking template for Excel to identify risks, monitor them and work with your team to address them if they actualize.

Project Scope Template

Our free project scope template for Word will help you define what’s in and out of scope for your project, including when measuring the quality of your deliverables. It features space to add your constraints, assumptions, cost estimates and more.

Requirements Gathering Template

Requirements gathering collects everything that is required for your project and helps developers and designers understand the users and customer needs. Part of this will be related to quality control. Our free requirements gathering template for Word helps you identify all the requirements for your project.

ProjectManager Helps You Manage Control Quality

Our project management templates are a great planning tool, but when you’re executing, monitoring and trying to control the project, you’ll need something more dynamic. After all, templates are static documents that must be manually updated and aren’t great for collaboration.

ProjectManager is award-winning project and portfolio management software that has multiple project views that help you track project deliverables in real time, such as kanban boards that can help you track quality issues from the point of identification through resolving them. You can manage risk to avoid or respond quickly to quality issues. Use our software to manage resources to maintain quality deliverables and keep your project team working at capacity to meet deadlines and stay productive.

Allocate Project Resources and Track Utilization

Part of delivering quality is making sure your team’s tasks are well-allocated. First, we make it easier for you to assign tasks to your team by allowing managers to set their availability in advance. You can see if the team member has PTO, vacation time or enjoying a global holiday.

Then toggle over to the color-coded workload chart and view your whole team’s allocation on one page. You can reallocate resources right from the chart to balance the team’s workload and keep them working productively without eroding morale.

Automate Workflows to Control Quality

One way to manage quality and streamline processes is through automation. Use our customized workflows to automate more common tasks and free your team to focus on the more complex and important tasks. You can set any number of triggers that will in turn create any number of actions to automate routine busy work.

To ensure that only quality moves forward, set task approvals so authorized team members or quality experts can make sure that nothing that shouldn’t go through has moved forward in the process.

Quality Control Template