Um, I think what Randy is saying is that we shouldn't allow ourselves to twist in the wind that an auditor is blowing, or that we think he/she is blowing.
Randy's quite right about the scheduling being based on your needs and risks. Riskier and problematic areas get audited more often. When a single process is shared in more than one system, the audits are scheduled in the same time frame - like training.
Do scheduling based on your processes and not the standards' elements, requirements of which are sometimes scattered and numbered differently in various management systems. The exception to this is when a standard calls out somehow that such-an-element will be assessed at such-a-maximum-frequency. Our auditor likes to see our master schedule approximately mapped out five years in advance. We use a spreadsheet to record it.
Here's how making a schedule happens.
1. List your processes; identify their management system(s).
2. Arrange your closely related processes into families or departments.
3. Assess your processes for risk if they are not effective. Identify that.
4. Decide on the frequency of each risk type/level: 1 year, 2 years, 3 years? Like Randy said, this is up to you.
5. Start plugging in your tentative processes into month-to-month time frames. Preferably in each year you'd have at least one process being assessed in a given department. Make sure you wold not be overloading the auditor, keeping mind that many factors and data for a shared process like training would be the same, but some may be unique; so doing these 3-in-1 audits might take the time to do 1 1/2 or so single audits.
6. Review your schedule for feasability, and make changes as you think are warranted based on, for example, the processes' past performance. If there have been nonconformances in prior audits, you might decide they ought to be scheduled in the next year whereas they would otherwise skip a year.
7. Make changes and ask the process owners if the scheduled audits would interfere with projects they expect to be going on at the time. (This doesn't mean they should not be assessed if they are still busy making products/services for the customer.)
8. Make final changes and base your annual month-to-month schedule on this long-range view. You would have an integrated schedule that still serves the different standards' unique process requirements.
As Randy said, this is something that there is no one right way to perform. You could, on th other hand, make a draft and share it with the Cove, and we can give specific feedback.