NABL
NABL accreditation — National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories
Built in India, for the paperwork Indian assessors actually ask for.
NABL applies ISO/IEC 17025 and ISO 15189 in India, and adds its own document requirements on top — most visibly the Unique Laboratory Report number that has to appear on every accredited report. Generic LIMS products treat ULR as a text field. ErgoLIMS allocates it in the database, atomically, which is the difference between a numbering scheme and a numbering problem. One thing we will not do on this page: call any software "NABL-complete," or hand you a count of ISO/IEC 17025 clauses it claims to cover. NABL accredits a laboratory’s competence and practice, not a codebase, and a clause-count has no meaning independent of how your lab actually runs the system day to day. What we will show you is the mechanism itself, below, so you can judge it on that rather than on a score we made up.
Who this is for: NABL-accredited labs and labs preparing their first application, in testing, calibration or medical disciplines.
ULR allocation that cannot collide
The ULR is composed as NABL’s clarification of June 2026 prescribes: your full accreditation certificate number, the two-digit year, and an eight-digit running number that restarts each calendar year — 17 characters for a TC-XXXXX certificate, 16 for TC/CC/RC-XXXX, 26 for the new NABL certificate format. Allocation happens inside a single atomic database statement, so two analysts issuing reports at the same moment cannot receive the same number, and the series can only ever move forward — there is no path that back-dates or reuses one.
- One series per certificate per calendar year, shared across all the lab’s sites — resets every 1 January
- Certificate number written exactly as NABL writes it (separators stripped, upper-cased) so a typo cannot fork the sequence
- Issued only on reports within the accredited scope; a non-accredited test report carries no ULR
- A lab with no accreditation certificate on record gets no ULR, rather than a fabricated one
- The ULR is stored on the report, not derived at print time, so a reprint years later shows the number that was issued
Scope of accreditation
Accreditation is granted per test, per method, per matrix, per range — and reporting an out-of-scope test under the accreditation symbol is one of the fastest ways to earn a non-conformity.
- Methods carry their accreditation status, so in-scope and out-of-scope tests are distinguishable
- Reports can separate accredited from non-accredited results rather than presenting them identically
- Authorised signatories are held per department, with the signatory snapshot stored on the issued report
Proficiency testing and inter-laboratory comparison
PT participation is a NABL condition, not an optional quality exercise. Rounds, results and performance are tracked in the system with the statistics computed rather than typed in.
- PT rounds with provider, scheme, assigned value and reported value
- z-score computed and flagged satisfactory / questionable / unsatisfactory at the standard 2 and 3 thresholds
- Unsatisfactory outcomes can be linked to a CAPA, so the follow-up is traceable to the round that triggered it
Report structure
Report layouts are built in Report Studio, so a lab can hold a NABL-format layout and a customer-specific layout side by side without maintaining two systems.
- Per-customer and per-document-type templates across eight document types
- Blocks for opinions and interpretations, and for statements of conformity with the decision rule (§7.8.6, §7.8.7)
- QR verification on issued certificates, with revoked certificates returning a clear gone response rather than silently still verifying
- Signature handling configurable per lab: e-signature, signature image, or both
Selecting NABL at signup turns these on
The testing and calibration packs enable the full ISO 17025 module set. The medical pack (ISO 15189) enables the same core minus the ones that only apply to testing labs.
accreditation code: nabl_testing · nabl_calibration · nabl_medical
What ErgoLIMS does not do here
Every vendor page lists what the software handles. These are the boundaries, so you find them now rather than three weeks into an evaluation.
- NABL accredits laboratories, not software. There is no such thing as a NABL-approved LIMS, and any vendor claiming one is describing something that does not exist.
- The system does not decide whether a test is within your scope — it stores the status you record against each method and reports accordingly.
- ISO 15189 medical labs are supported through the NABL medical pack, but the clinical domain templates are lighter than the testing ones.
- ULR allocation requires the accreditation certificate number to be on record. Without it, no ULR is issued.
Questions we get asked
Labs that hold this
Other standards
Bring your assessor’s checklist
The most useful demo is the one where you read the audit trail yourself and try to break an authority check. We would rather you found the limits in the demo than after signing.