Internal & external audits: first-, second-, and third-party audits. 1  A first-party audit is performed within an organization to measure its strengths and weaknesses against its own procedures or methods and/or against external standards adopted by (voluntary) or imposed on (mandatory) the organization.
Precursor (chemistry) In chemistry, a precursor is a compound that participates in a chemical reaction that produces another compound. In biochemistry, the term precursor often refers more specifically to a chemical compound preceding another in a metabolic pathway, such as a protein precursor. 1 Illicit drug precursors.
With its prefix pre-, meaning before, a precursor is literally a forerunner, and in fact forerunner first appeared as the translation of the Latin praecursor. But the two words function a little differently today.