NCR template

A non-conformance report template, with the columns explained.

Twenty-two columns, three worked NCRs from a construction site, a factory and a fit-out, and one line on why each column is there. Download it, copy it into a sheet, or read what makes an NCR stand up in an audit. No form, no email.

↓ Excel (.xlsx)9 KB · drop-downs for Severity, Disposition and Status, header row frozen, a second sheet explaining the columns ↓ CSV2 KB · the same columns and example rows, opens in anything

22 COLUMNS · 3 EXAMPLE NCRS · NO GATE

NCR No.	Raised on	Raised by	Project / job	Location / area	Reference	Requirement	Non-conformance	Evidence	Severity	Containment	Responsible party	Disposition	Disposition approved by	Root cause	Corrective action	Due	Status	Verified by	Closed on	Linked items	Notes
NCR-031	2026-05-12	P. Lindqvist (site engineer)	Harbour St, Stage 2	Basement 2, transfer slab pour 3, grid C–D / 4–6	S-201 rev C note 7; ITP-CON-03 item 4	Bottom cover 50 mm to reinforcement.	Cover measured 30–35 mm over approx. 4 m² at C5, where 25 mm bar chairs had been used and two had collapsed.	IMG_5120.jpg; cover meter log CM-0512	Major	Pour 3 held. Pump rebooked for 14 May.	Northside Steel Fixing	Rework	D. Marsh (structural engineer)	25 mm chairs delivered and used where 50 mm were specified. Chair size was not checked against the drawing at delivery.	Replace chairs across the bay. Chair size added to the pre-pour check as a hold point.	2026-05-13	Closed	D. Marsh (structural engineer)	2026-05-13	D-1182	Pour went ahead 14 May.
NCR-032	2026-05-14	A. Ruiz (QC inspector, line 2)	PO 44817, bracket BR-220	Line 2, weld cell 3	Customer drawing BR-220 rev D note 3; WPS-017 rev B	No visible surface porosity on fillet welds.	Surface porosity on 9 of 40 sampled brackets from batch 0514-A.	IMG_7731–7734.jpg; inspection sheet QC-0514	Major	Batch 0514-A (220 units) quarantined and red-tagged.	Weld cell 3, day shift	Repair	Customer quality engineer (email, 15 May)	Shielding gas flow low after a regulator swap. Gas flow was not on the cell start-up check.	Grind out and re-weld affected brackets. Gas flow reading added to the cell start-up check.	2026-05-20	Action in progress	—	—	—	Customer to witness re-inspection of the batch.
NCR-033	2026-05-15	T. Moana (fit-out supervisor)	Level 9 fit-out, 200 Queen St	Level 9, stair 2 lobby, door D9.04	Door schedule rev F; fire engineering report FER-02 s4.3	-/60/30 fire door set, tagged, with certification for leaf and frame.	Door delivered and hung with no compliance tag. Supplier cannot yet produce certification for the leaf.	IMG_8802.jpg; delivery docket 55120	Critical	Door marked not to be signed off. Sign fixed to the frame.	Apex Doors (supplier)	Reject / return	—	—	—	2026-05-22	Under review	—	—	D-2047	Do not accept on a statement. Tag and certificate, or replace the set.

Scroll sideways for the rest of the columns. The three rows are the worked examples further down; the file carries the same three so you can see the shape before you delete them.

The columns

What each column is for

An NCR records three things: what the requirement was, how the work missed it, and who decided what to do about that. Every column below serves one of those three, in file order. The ones people leave blank are the ones an auditor reads first.

01NCR No.: A permanent number, assigned once and never reused, even when an NCR is rejected. A gap in the sequence is a question an auditor will ask, so a rejected NCR keeps its number and its row.
02Raised on: The date the non-conformance was found. Not the date it was typed up, and not the date of the meeting where it was discussed.
03Raised by: The person who found it, with their role. An NCR raised by the structural engineer and one raised by a leading hand carry different weight, and the reader needs to know which this is.
04Project / job: The project, job, purchase order or product line. On a factory log this is the PO or part number, because that is what the customer will quote back to you.
05Location / area: Where it is, precisely enough to walk to: level and gridline on a site, line and station in a plant. “Basement” is not a location. “Basement 2, transfer slab pour 3, grid C–D / 4–6” is.
06Reference: The document that sets the requirement, with its revision: the drawing and note, the specification clause, the ITP item, the welding procedure. No reference, no non-conformance. If nothing written was breached, it is an observation or a defect, not an NCR.
07Requirement: What the reference actually says, quoted or as a number. Writing it down in the row stops the argument where everybody remembers the specification differently.
08Non-conformance: What was found, measured, and how much of it: “cover 30–35 mm over approx. 4 m²”, “9 of 40 sampled”. The extent is what decides the disposition, so a row without it cannot be dispositioned.
09Evidence: Photo filenames, test certificates, inspection sheet numbers. The evidence has to exist at the moment the NCR is raised; a photo taken after the rework proves the rework, not the non-conformance.
10Severity: Minor, Major or Critical, from definitions you agree before the job starts. If every NCR is Major, the column is decoration. Critical should mean something stops: a pour, a shipment, a handover.
11Containment: What was done straight away to stop it spreading: the pour held, the batch quarantined, the door tagged. Containment is separate from correction, and an NCR with no containment usually means the problem kept being built while the paperwork was written.
12Responsible party: Who owns the fix. One company or one team, spelled the way it appears on their invoices or the org chart.
13Disposition: What happens to the non-conforming work: Rework (make it conform), Repair (make it acceptable but not to the original requirement), Use as is, Reject / return, or Scrap. This is the decision the NCR exists to record.
14Disposition approved by: The person with the authority to accept it, by name. Repair and Use as is are deviations from the requirement, so they need the designer, the engineer or the customer to accept them in writing. A Use as is with a blank here is a concession nobody can prove was given.
15Root cause: Why it happened, in a sentence someone could act on. Not a name. “Operator error” is not a root cause; it is the point where the investigation stopped.
16Corrective action: What changes so it does not happen again: a check added, a procedure changed, a supplier dropped. Fixing the item is the disposition. Fixing the process is this column.
17Due: The date the corrective action is due. Set from the severity, not from the next meeting.
18Status: Open, Under review, Disposition approved, Action in progress, Awaiting verification, Closed or Rejected. Give each status a named owner who is allowed to move it, and do not let the responsible party move a row to Closed.
19Verified by: The person who checked that the disposition was carried out and the corrective action is in place. It must not be the responsible party. On a structural NCR it is usually the engineer who approved the disposition.
20Closed on: The date it was verified and closed. A recurrence is a new NCR that references this one, never a reopened row.
21Linked items: The numbers of the rework items in your defect or punch list. The NCR records the decision; the rework is done and signed off on the list the trades already work from. This column is the only thing that joins them.
22Notes: Anything that does not fit. Never a substitute for the columns: if you are writing the disposition or the status in here, the log has already started to drift.

Filling it in

Three NCRs, three industries

The same columns work on a slab, a production line and a fit-out floor. What changes is the reference and who is allowed to accept a deviation.

NCR-031, the slab. Found on the pre-pour check, the morning of the pour. The reference is the drawing note and the ITP item, the requirement is a number, and the non-conformance is a measurement over an area. Containment is the only thing that mattered that morning: the pour was held and the pump rebooked. Disposition is Rework, approved by the structural engineer, who also verified it, and the corrective action changes the pre-pour check so the chair size is checked before the steel goes down. The rework itself, D-1182, was issued to the steel fixer on the defect list.

NCR-032, the weld batch. A sample of 40 from a batch of 220 found 9 with porosity. Containment is quarantining the whole batch, not the nine. The disposition is Repair, which is a deviation from the original weld, so the customer’s quality engineer accepted it in writing, and the approval column says how and when. The root cause is a process fault, not a person, and the corrective action puts a gas flow reading on the cell start-up check. It is Action in progress until the customer witnesses the re-inspection.

NCR-033, the fire door. A supplier non-conformance: the product arrived without the tag and the certification the fire engineering report requires. Severity is Critical because the door cannot be signed off and the floor cannot be handed over with it. The disposition is Reject / return and the status is Under review while the supplier is given a week to produce the certificate. Root cause and corrective action are blank on purpose; they are the supplier’s to answer. The note says what the team is not going to do, which is accept the door on a statement.

The limit

Where an NCR log breaks

An NCR log in a spreadsheet works for a handful of NCRs a month and one person who owns it. It fails in three predictable ways, and none of them is about how carefully it was filled in.

The week of the audit

The NCR is closed, the rework is not

NCR-031 was closed in the log the day the engineer approved the rework. The rework itself lived on the defect list, in another file, and nobody checked that D-1182 was actually signed off before the NCR was. The auditor pulls the NCR, follows the reference, and finds an open item behind a closed record. Two lists that describe one problem will disagree; the only question is when you find out.

Eleven months later

The concession nobody wrote down

Use as is, agreed on site between the supervisor and the engineer’s graduate, with a handshake and a “that’ll be fine”. The row says Use as is and the approval column is blank. When the customer’s claim arrives, there is no name, no date and no document behind the one decision in the NCR that mattered. A Repair or Use as is without a named approver is not a concession. It is an undocumented deviation.

The third time

Root cause: operator error

Every NCR in the log says operator error, the corrective action is retraining, and the same weld porosity turns up in June, August and October. The log cannot show the pattern because each row was written as a one-off and the root cause column was filled in to close the row, not to find the cause. If the same classification appears three times, the corrective action did not work, and a spreadsheet will not tell you that unless someone goes looking.

What to do about it

Keep the decision and the fix on one record.

Most of what goes wrong with an NCR log goes wrong in the gap between the NCR and the rework. The decision is in one file and the fix is on a list the trades work from, and the Linked items column is the only thread between them. Whatever holds your NCRs should close that gap: the non-conformance found on a check, the rework raised from it, issued to one owner, fixed with a photo, and verified by someone who did not do the work, as one trail.

That is how IssuesId runs it. A failed answer on an inspection checklist raises a tracked item linked to the question, and the question flips back to Yes when the item is closed. The item runs the defect lifecycle, with a type and a classification to mark it out as a non-conformance and a dispute path for the trade who says it conforms. How to track non-conformities in a factory walks through it on a production line, and construction defect management software on a site. If the spreadsheet is working, keep it; the columns above are the part that matters.