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Compliance Software Buyer's Guide
Table of Contents
- » What is Compliance Software?
- » How does Compliance Software Work?
- » Is it Worth Investing Money in Compliance Software?
- » Features of Compliance Software
- » Benefits of Compliance Software
- » What are the key buying factors to be considered before choosing the compliance software?
- » How to choose Good Compliance Software?
- » Pricing of the Compliance Software
- » Conclusion
Every business is a legal entity that has to function in an ecosystem of various compliances. This means every business has to function within a legal framework of its obligations towards the welfare, health, and safety of others. The government, depending on your industry and the size of your business, imposes these compliances. These compliances revolve around taxes, employment and labour laws, antitrust laws, advertising, environmental regulations, and licensing, etc. Management of your compliances ranges from internal and external policies and rules to internal and external auditing, third-party auditing, etc. Many companies still use traditional manual methods of compliance management. These methods are not only cumbersome but also leave a lot of errors and chances. Any errors in compliance management lead to legal problems, heavy fines & penalties, and criminal charges against the defaulting company. With the digitization of all processes and the demand for information sharing in digital formats, it’s in the interest of businesses to move towards digital compliance management software.
» What is Compliance Software?
To simply explain, compliance management software or a compliance management system automates all your compliance and legal requirements. It integrates itself with the regulations that different departments of a business are supposed to adhere to and simplifies the internal standards, regulations, and policies vis-à-vis the external governmental regulations. This is a strategic tool that helps a business execute all its compliance-related tasks in an integrated and collaborative manner so as to reduce risks and lapses as much as possible.
» How does Compliance Software Work?
Compliance management software centralizes your entire compliance-related framework and creates libraries to stack all your standards, policies, and regulations. A compliance system, through these centralized libraries, links the procedures, regulations, and standards to your individual business areas. The compliance system then converts these into interactive reports and dashboards with the relevant users and departments within the business. Compliance monitoring software effectively builds the capacities of your legal team with the requisite skills and information necessary to manage the risks that you might face.
» Is it Worth Investing Money in Compliance Software?
Compliance management software is a very reliable way to pre-empt and address the risks that your organization might face while complying to the complex regulatory framework laid down by the government related to your industry. With the compliance management system, you are always better prepared for audits and minimizing unconscious violations. Therefore, it is considered to be a sound investment with long-term benefits for a business.
» Features of Compliance Software
Now that we have established the importance of compliance management software, it is essential to have a customized compliance management solution so as to avoid any errors or lapses in meeting the compliances. For this, it is essential to understand the features of the best compliance management software. Here is a list of the features:
› Monitoring of controls
This is one of the most important features of compliance management software, monitoring of controls helps in businesses to effectively comply with the policies and regulations laid down by the government by documenting the controls in a centralized library. When the controls are integrated and centralized, the workflow becomes simple and easy to execute. This also helps in effective execution of processes.
› Management of policies
Compliance management software helps in simplifying the organizational workflows by documenting all the compliance-related information and making them shareable with the relevant working groups. This concentration of timelines, historical compliance data, information, reports, and bylaws help in maintaining a consistency that is essential for maintaining smooth work processes.
› Alert features
Compliance management system ensures that you receive regular alerts and notifications about all the activities. These alerts are especially beneficial when there have been some lapses in meeting the compliances as they help in taking immediate corrective action as and when required. This also helps the working teams to be proactive and do away with unnecessary and time-consuming escalations.
› Customized dashboards
Compliance systems come inbuilt with dashboards including charts, graphs, and infographics to help the departments’ review information pertaining specifically to their department instead of going through heaps of irrelevant data and information.
› Identification of risks
One of the most important features of the Compliance management system is the cataloging of risks. This helps in documenting them not only for the use of the relevant departments but also for avoiding making such lapses in the future.
› Risk Matrices
Compliance management system uses matrices that allow businesses to define the rating methods that they would like to use, the values that they would like to compare themselves on, etc.
› Assessment of risks
Another important feature of Compliance management software is that it helps businesses to create their own templates or use pre-installed templates in the software system to assess various risks that they might be exposed to. Some of the risks that these templates allow businesses to assess are information technology risks, risks to their projects, product development risks, business risks or risks to their employee welfare processes.
» Benefits of Compliance Software
We all understand the importance of keeping our business compliant to the various laws and regulations pertaining to the place that you operate and the nature of your industry. We have put together the benefits of using compliance management software. Here is a list of the benefits:
› Effective management of risk
Compliance management solution allows the pre-emptive assumption of risks that your business might be about to face. Not only it pre-empts the risks but also assesses them and helps your business in tackling and managing these risks. Since these software use analytics and insights, they help catch potential risks before they become a real threat to your business. With this software, an organization can make more sound decisions about how to ward away compliance-related risks. In the long run, compliance management solutions help businesses in running more efficiently, being more productive, and staying competitive for a long time to come.
› Efficient business processes
Compliance management solutions help a business in devising its processes as per the compliances laid down by the government. This helps not only in effective management of operations but also in letting the processes be risk-free. This way, businesses know what impacts their processes and profits and devise strategies accordingly.
› Reduction in costs
A great advantage of the compliance management system is that it helps businesses in reducing their operating and administrative costs. This is because once you automate and digitize a particular function, use of additional manpower and their salaries, etc. goes down immediately. The processes also become faster and more collaborative. Once you start using compliance management solutions the possibility of human error that might result in lapses in compliances reduces. This further reduces the cost of litigation, fines, and other regulatory complications and loss of reputation.
› The Business has a competitive edge
By utilizing a compliance system, you make your processes and system resilient to any changes in the rules and regulations. By implementing changes, a business stays adept and in line with the laws. Using compliance systems also makes your processes efficient and less time-consuming. Since the processes are now mostly automated, your teams can spend time on bigger things concerning the business and focus on bettering the core areas rather than spending time daily on mundane day-to-day administrative tasks.
› Enhances the credibility of the business
Compliance management software helps businesses stay up to date with the current rules and regulations imposed by the government, following these rules, procedures, and regulations automatically ensures that you are functioning ethically and transparently. The consumer’s trusts businesses that operate ethically and do not violate any rules or laws of the land immensely. In the long run, you ensure customer loyalty resulting in increased profitability.
» What are the key buying factors to be considered before choosing the compliance software?
Every compliance software comes bundled with multiple features and technologies. Therefore, it becomes a little confusing for businesses to choose the best performing compliance management software specific to the needs of their business. To top it all, every business has different needs depending on the country that it is operating and the kind of industry that it functions in. We are sharing some key factors that you should keep in mind before selecting the best compliance management system for your business.
› Does your company need the software?
By now we have understood that to survive, a business has to follow the rules, procedures, and regulations implemented by their respective government. However, making people responsible for reading up on all the laws, ensuring compliance with them, flagging when you are lagging behind anything, filing the required compliance documents is quite challenging. It is always advisable to automate this process to not only save time, which can be spent on meeting more business objectives; it also reduces the chance of human error. Any errors in following the compliances can lead to serious issues like financial penalties, legal damages, and loss of reputation.
› What are your requirements from the software?
Every business will have different requirements from the compliance management system. This will depend on the nature of the industry that the business belongs to and the country that it operates in. For you to make a sound technology investment, you should clearly define your requirements and expectations from the compliance management software.
› What is your budget?
For this very essential software and investing in it, it is important that you earmark a budget separately. In case the budget is not determined, you might end up spending much more than you can afford. On the other hand, you should avoid cutting corners to save money. You should not invest in low-quality software to save money. This might result in larger problems for your business regarding compliances and adherence to laws.
» How to choose Good Compliance Software?
With thousands of software solution options available in the market, it may become quite confusing for businesses to make a sound investment decision. Every brand claims its software is better than the others. We are listing some points, which will help you differentiate great productive software from a not so productive one.
› Understand your organization’s unique needs:
The compliance management software should be essentially chosen according to the specific needs of your business. For that, you need to understand and study the rules, procedures, and regulations that apply to your business. Then you should conduct an assessment to see if you have enough resources to absorb and manage this system on a daily basis.
› Integration and Compatibility:
The Compliance monitoring software that you choose should have compatibility with your existing business networks and tools. If this is not the case then there is a chance that your teams will spend precious time and resources on either buying new business networks and tools or constantly making adjustments between the two to develop collaboration and compatibility.
› Customer testimonials:
The best way to choose a compliance management solution is to assess the reviews of its existing consumers. Mostly the reviews posted by consumers are free of any bias and any commercial interest. These are posted after genuinely using the compliance software.
» Pricing of the Compliance Software
The pricing of a Compliance Management System depends on a number of factors- its features, brand name, compatibility with global technologies and networks, number of years that the brand has been in existence, compatibility, etc. Generally, the pricing varies between $ 50 - $ 100 a month. It is strongly recommended that you use the free basic version before buying the entire software suite to assess the compatibility of the software with your existing systems and tools. This will also give you an idea about how comfortable the actual users are while using the software.
» Conclusion
We hope that by now, you would have understood all the nuances of a compliance management system. We strongly urge you to invest in this very important software that will help you in adhering to the rules and regulations that your business needs to comply with. You should make an informed decision that should be based on clear assessment and due diligence. In case you feel overwhelmed by the multiple brands available with similar-sounding features, we suggest you take guidance from unbiased online information sources that review and rate each software transparently.