Multi-site training organisation: how the Qualiopi audit works when you open a new establishment

A second rented space in another city, a satellite location opened to reach a new pool of trainees, a CFA that multiplies its training sites over a few years: growth for a training organisation almost always means opening new establishments. What gets overlooked is that this expansion touches two separate tracks — your activity declaration and your Qualiopi certification — each with its own rules for what is called a “multi-site” organisation.

One activity licence, several establishments

The first point of confusion for organisations opening their first secondary establishment: the activity declaration number (NDA) is tied to your legal entity — your SIREN number — not to each address where you deliver training. In practice, a single NDA covers the head office and every secondary establishment attached to it; there is no separate NDA per establishment (SIRET).

That doesn’t remove the paperwork. Article L. 6351-4 of the French Labour Code requires you to report any change to the elements listed in your original declaration, and opening a new establishment is one of them. The deadline is set by article R. 6351-8: 30 days from the opening date, filed as an amended declaration on the Mon Activité Formation portal with the DREETS that registered your original declaration. Our article on amending your activity declaration covers the step-by-step procedure; it applies here in exactly the same way, with the new establishment’s address as the reason for the change.

What Qualiopi calls a “multi-site” organisation

The French national quality framework (Référentiel National Qualité) doesn’t treat each establishment as a separate organisation to be certified in isolation. A certification body recognises an organisation as multi-site when three conditions are met: every site has permanent staff, all sites report to a single central function that holds authority over the quality system (procedures, indicator monitoring, handling of non-conformities), and all establishments share the same NDA. A one-off meeting point rented for a handful of sessions, with no staff and no ongoing activity, generally doesn’t count as a “site” under this definition — but the exact qualification is for your certification body to confirm before you report anything.

This recognition changes how the audit runs. A multi-site organisation doesn’t get one audit per establishment: it keeps a single certificate, covering every declared site, audited using a method adapted to the number of establishments.

The multi-site audit: sampling logic, not a full audit of every site

This is the least understood point for growing organisations: beyond one or two establishments, the auditor doesn’t necessarily visit every site at every audit. Qualiopi certification bodies generally apply a sampling approach, in the spirit of the one used for multi-site audits of management systems (an approach codified internationally by accreditation frameworks, notably the IAF MD1 document for management-system audits): the number of sites visited grows with the total number of sites, without being proportional — auditing an organisation with forty establishments doesn’t mean forty visits.

Under this logic:

• the central function (the head office, which holds the quality system) is always audited, whatever the audit type;
• for an initial or renewal audit, the number of sampled sites follows a progression close to the square root of the total number of sites;
• for a surveillance audit, the sample is generally smaller, with the requirement that no site stays out of scope across several cycles in a row;
• when new sites are added to an already-certified scope, the sample covers the newly added sites.

This method isn’t identical across certification bodies: each applies it within the framework of its Cofrac accreditation, with its own specifics. Ask your certification body directly, as soon as you apply for multi-site status, for the exact rule it applies — that’s contractual information, not a generality to infer from a blog post.

Adding a site to an already-certified scope: scope extension

The Qualiopi certificate doesn’t automatically extend to a new establishment. Every site must be reported to the certification body, including any whose activity partly falls outside the certified scope. In practice, opening a new establishment mid-cycle means:

1. Reporting the new site to your certification body, with its real opening date and address.
2. Filing the amended declaration with your DREETS, within 30 days, exactly as for any change to your activity declaration.
3. Anticipating a scope-extension audit if the certification body judges it necessary given the number of sites added — separate from the schedule of your already-planned surveillance audit.
4. Updating public-facing information — website, quotes, agreements — so the new address appears everywhere your organisation communicates, in line with indicator 1.

The order matters: report the site to your certification body before the next audit, not during it. An establishment that has been running for months without being reported to the certification body creates a gap between the declared scope and the real scope — exactly the kind of inconsistency an auditor spots within minutes, and one that can be flagged as a non-conformity.

The mistakes that cost the most in practice

• Opening a site and only reporting it at audit time. The certification body then discovers an establishment that has been operating outside the declared scope for months, which raises questions about the reliability of your regulatory monitoring — the core of indicator 23.
• Confusing the DREETS declaration with the certification-body declaration. These are two separate steps, with different recipients and different deadlines. Handling one never exempts you from the other.
• Closing an establishment without reporting it either. The same amended-declaration logic applies to closing a site, with the same 30-day deadline.
• Underestimating the time a scope-extension audit takes when a funder or client makes their funding conditional on the new site being certified: better to plan for it several months before the commercial opening than to discover it under time pressure.

What research shows about quality across multi-site organisations

Keeping a consistent quality standard across several establishments of the same organisation isn’t unique to vocational training. In a 2005 study published in the European Journal of Marketing, Marta Fernández Barcala and Lucía Melián Alzola examine quality management within franchise networks and show that the gap in quality perception between the franchisor (who owns the shared standard) and each local unit is one of the main drivers of disparity between establishments in the same network (“An analysis of quality management in franchise systems”, 2005 — see the study). That’s exactly the challenge for a multi-site training organisation: the central function can write a single procedure, but it still has to be applied identically by every local team — which is precisely what the auditor checks by sampling sites rather than relying on the head office’s account alone.

Take action

Opening a new establishment deserves its own checklist: an amended DREETS declaration within 30 days, reporting to the certification body before the next audit, updated public-facing information. The Complete Kit Certif (€297, 14-day guarantee) provides the evidence tables for all 32 indicators and templates to duplicate for each site, with the specific points multi-site organisations need to watch. Just opening your very first establishment? The ebook “Set up your training organisation in 30 days” (€67) covers the initial declaration step by step — or choose the Complete Pack (€347) that bundles both.