Compliance management software has become crucial for every organization. But you need to understand it first before incorporating it into your enterprise’s system. Regardless of your industry, regulatory compliance is an important component of ongoing success.

Staying on top of your compliance obligations can be challenging, and a strong compliance management program will require a compliance management system. This guide will help you out with it.

While more organizations are moving towards compliance management, there are still people who have no idea about it. If you fall into the latter category, don’t worry because we have brought this comprehensive guide for your help.

The information here includes the definition of compliance management software, its features, and its benefits. So you will be able to understand the concept completely. Let’s begin.

• What is Compliance Management Software?
• Features Of Software For Compliance Management
• Benefits Of Compliance Management Software
• What is Compliance Management Software?
• What Are The Components of Compliance Management Software?
• How do You Implement a Compliance Management System?
• What Does a Compliance Management System Look Like?
• How do You Implement Compliance Training?
• Who is Responsible For Managing Compliance Risk in The Bank?
• What is The Purpose of a Compliance Management System?
• What is Required For Compliance Management
• What is The First Step in Developing a Compliance Program?
• What Makes a Good Compliance Program?
• Compliance Management Tools
• Legal Compliance Software
• Compliance Management System For Banks
• Compliance Management Framework
• Compliance Software Vendors

What is Compliance Management Software?

Every enterprise consists of several components, such as data, processes, and communication. Software for compliance management automates, streamlines, and connects all these aspects to meet the industry standards and regulations. This system proves to be beneficial for organizations, irrespective of the domain in which they are operating.

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In case a company doesn’t follow these regulations or standards, they may get subjected to some severe consequences. For this reason, it is best to opt for the software and get everything working smoothly.

Features Of Software For Compliance Management

Some of the standard features of compliance management software that will help you understand it better are:

• Seeking out trends from the stored data
• Managing different aspects of the organization’s system like processes, documents, events, and frauds
• Remaining updated with any new regulations or standards introduced by the authorities
• Generating compliance reports to be analyzed by the organization’s management so that they can take appropriate actions on time
• Proper security of all the data managed by the software at all levels
• Complete risk management for business processes
• Compatible with offline functioning
• An uncomplicated interface that can be handled by anyone in the enterprise
• Managing the entire workflow and tasks of the organization for more efficient and low-time consuming results
• Compatible to be integrated with third-party applications to seek better outcomes

These were some standard features you can find in software for compliance management. However, every application is different from one another. So it may be possible that your selected one will have distinct and more useful features that will benefit your organization.

Benefits Of Compliance Management Software

Now that you know how your compliance management system will look like, let’s see a few benefits you will obtain with its integration. Remember, the advantages can change based on the industry in which your organization is operating. These are some of the common pointers that are seen in almost all cases.

• More Structured Operations: As stated in the features, the software manages all the tasks and processes of a company. It also provides appropriate audits and evaluations from time to time. Therefore, there is scope to make the operations more structured so that the quality of work can be improved.
• Better Cooperation: Every organization consists of different sections. Here, a significant reason for incompliance is due to a lack of cooperation between these divisions. As the entire system will get automated and centralized with the software, the collaboration between these departments will also get better.
• Legal Safety: To keep your organization secure from any legal hassle, you must ensure that it follows all the legal, environmental, social, financial, corporate, and government regulations. All these compliances become trouble-free with the help of the software. As it automates everything, there are little to no chances of going wrong anywhere and facing legal problems.
• Enhanced Decision Making: Documenting everything and generating reports is one of the basic features of the software. Further, it can support analytics by seeking trends from the given data. This helps in enhancing the decision making of the enterprise because there is more information and added factors to learn from.

What is Compliance Management Software?

Compliance management software is a business system that centralizes, consolidates, automates and streamlines processes, files and communication relevant to an organization’s adherence to meeting government and professional standards and regulations required in their industry.

This type of software helps you manage risks, deploy an optimized workflow and empower staff with greater visibility and knowledge on compliance requirements to steer your organization away from costly penalties or, worse, shut down.

What Are The Components of Compliance Management Software?

Here is a summary of the most important components of an effective compliance monitoring system:

1. Questionnaire management

You need complete control over the set up and maintenance of audit checklists for each of the regulatory frameworks with which you work. This allows you to standardise the process and deliver consistent outcomes.

2. Security enabled workflow

Different types of audit may have different workflows and your system must allow you to control which users can view and/or modify an audit at each stage in its life-cycle.

3. Corrective action management

The audit process must identify non compliances or infringements, and your system must be able to identify and track every individual issue until it has been appropriately resolved.

4. Granular security management

To work effectively your system must accommodate a range of internal and external users, and be able to assign rights to view specific data items as well as perform certain functions.

5. Support for multiple auditing bodies

Your system should be able to accommodate multiple auditing bodies and identify their individual audit personnel. It may be tempting to assign all your third party audits to a single provider, but there are benefits to selecting several.

6. Secure dashboard for external parties

Your external parties, set up with appropriate user rights, should be able to access their data via a dashboard. This enables you to reveal charts, reports and other analytical data, as well as scheduled audits, corrective actions and historical data to those who need to know.

7. Self-assessment capability

A good audit management system is also about helping and encouraging suppliers, facilities, etc, to become compliant. The solution must enable users to perform self-assessments on demand in order to maintain a compliant state, or to prepare for an upcoming vendor audit.

8. Risk-aware compliance management

You will never have all the resources you need to audit every facility as often as you would like. A useful way to apportion the auditing effort is to stratify your facilities according to risk and your system must accommodate this.

9. Easy-to-use, online audit conduct

At audit time, your auditors must be able to enter responses in real time via a web browser (see mobility, below). This speeds up the process, reduces audit and reporting time, minimises error, and provides a single point of audit capture. Audit questionnaires must be easy to navigate and must provide automatic scoring, response saving, and corrective action generation where the response is negative, and must allow the auditor to record observations, comments, and notes, and upload evidentiary material for any question.

10. Notifications

Insist on a solution that allows you to configure your own email communications system to keep all your stakeholders in the picture and save you the admin overhead of tracking who should get what and when. The solution must provide a wide range of trigger points which initiate emails.

11. Total mobility

Firstly, for your compliance management system to work effectively, it has to be web based, and it must support multiple browser platforms.

Secondly, and especially if your suppliers are in foreign countries where internet access is challenged or intermittent, your system must support mobile audit tools – tablet apps which allow you to perform audits in areas without internet access.

12. Cost sharing

Implementing a globally-accessible system is a significant task, and it does not come free. It is reasonable to consider a fee for participation in your compliance management program, which will offset the cost of setting up and maintaining your system over time.  If you want to impress your board, offer them a self-funding solution!

13. Top management support

You need the support of top management to get your system off the ground and to back you up in the future.   You need this for several reasons besides getting sign-off on the project.

14. Support services

If this sounds too daunting, be reassured that there are providers out there, like Compliance Experts, who can help you. When looking for a provider, one of the most important considerations is experience in the compliance field. This way you know the technical solution they offer is built on a foundation of practical know-how, and you can be sure that this will be reflected in the features of the system.

How do You Implement a Compliance Management System?

If you’re also a board member or stakeholder that comes from a background with little to no organizational governance experience, the thought of developing a compliance management program – let alone one that reflects best practices – can be an overwhelming proposition. 

Below are 10 steps to implement a compliance management system that will help you master the management of your organization’s compliance like a seasoned pro

1. Understand the issues

How the compliance management system will fit into your organisation’s current goals and operations.

2. Define stakeholder requirements

Considering all interested parties and stakeholders when implementing a compliance management system. 

3. Determine program scope

Considering how far to extend the reach of the program. 

4. Establish governance principles & compliance policy

Considering the complementary processes needed to ensure the compliance management system is successful and sustainable. 

5. Identify obligations & risks

Familiarisation with enforced local legislation and/or regulatory bodies, and self-appointed agreements that the organisation has entered into.

6. Develop plan to meet obligations & address risks

Monitoring the compliance management system for updates that may affect its profile, and making adjustments accordingly. 

7. Establish accountabilities & responsibilities

Ensuring the compliance management system receives full support and investment from the highest level of management.

8. Implement compliance management system

This step involves conceptualizing how the compliance management system will actually work.

9. Evaluate program performance & compliance reporting

An exhaustive list of recommended performance metrics and data to be tracked.

10. Manage non-compliance & continuous improvement

Ensuring a timely, efficient system is in place to immediately address, correct or mitigate noncompliance.

What Does a Compliance Management System Look Like?

A CMS helps a company to manage and meet its legal requirements and comply with applicable laws and regulations. Ideally, your CMS is an integrated system that incorporates employee compliance training, focused business processes, operational reviews, and corrective action strategies.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), one of the most important U.S. regulators in the banking industry, defines a CMS this way:

“A compliance management system is how an institution:

• Learns about its compliance responsibilities;
• Ensures that employees understand these responsibilities (via a compliance training program);
• Ensures that compliance requirements are incorporated into business processes;
• Reviews operations to ensure that responsibilities are carried out and requirements are met; and
• Takes corrective action and updates materials as necessary.”

An effective compliance management system, the FDIC states, typically include:

• Board and management oversight;
• The compliance program itself; and
• Regular audits of the compliance program.

While it’s easy to assume that a CMS focuses on the ways in which your financial institution protects customers and avoids money laundering, the reality is that market transactions are increasingly digital, using technologies that are vulnerable to unauthorized access.

A CMS, therefore, should focus on protecting data as well as responding to consumer complaints. Here’s how to create a compliance management program:

The Board of Directors

Your compliance program starts with your board of directors. It sets the business objectives that allow your organization to manage and mitigate risks.

Compliance Program

Your compliance program consists of written policies and procedures, training, monitoring, and corrective actions.

Traditionally, many of these policies and procedures focus on issues such as fair lending and mortgage servicing. But as financial firms increasingly use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms for data collection or communications, you need to consider how to avoid privacy violations and remain compliant with the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA).

For example, if you plan to use digital technology for loan servicing, you need to ensure that your vendor establishes controls ensuring that consumer protections remain in place.

Consumer Complaint Management Program

You need to be able to respond to consumer complaints and inquiries while also tracking, monitoring, and analyzing them. You also must protect your customer data from unauthorized access that affects its integrity, availability, and confidentiality.

Compliance Audit

Not only do you need a compliance program. You need to engage third-party auditors to ensure that your organization and your IT suppliers comply with requirements.

Regarding IT infrastructure, the CFPB Supervision and Examination Manual expressly incorporates security requirements of the GLBA and the Electronic Funds Transfer Act. As your customers engage in more electronic funds transfers, you need to ensure that your financial institution incorporates a review of the controls over vulnerabilities to data.

How do You Implement Compliance Training?

With clients, customers, employees, and stakeholders expecting greater transparency and ethical conduct, organizations must have a compliance training program in place in order to reduce risk, keep everyone up-to-date, maintain trust, and minimize the chance of violating the law.

Compliance training programs are often seen as extremely challenging to implement and deliver. However, when done correctly, the benefits are huge for an organization. Set your compliance training on the right track by focussing on these 4 essential elements:

1. Correct Leadership

Having a well-informed leadership team is essential before implementing your training.

They need to have knowledge of the organization’s goals and culture, as well as the relevant laws to best support the business to manage risk, maintain a positive reputation, and avoid penalties or lawsuits. Without this, the company is left vulnerable and likely to miss regulation changes or vital information that could prove to be devastating further down the line.

As well as a knowledgeable compliance team, businesses should also look to their L&D teams for support. Like any other training, delivery and awareness are important when it comes to implementing your corporate compliance training.

L&D teams should look for ways to make delivery simple but effective. Since regulations change often, you don’t want unnecessary time delays like having a difficult-to-navigate LMS or having to spend hours training employees how to use the system.

2. Implement The Correct Information

Offering up-to-date and relevant information is important to avoid any serious issues further down the line.

The key objectives of compliance training are to:

• Ensure that staff are aware of their compliance responsibilities
• Reduce risk
• Remove legal liability from the organisation in the event of malpractice
• Protect the organisation’s reputation
• Encourage a better workplace culture

Your corporate compliance training should cover your internal regulations as well as external laws. You should also conduct a risk assessment to identify areas of high risk so you can prioritize resources to tackle these first and ensure appropriate and sensible control measures are put in place.

Once you’ve accessed the high-risk areas, you can focus on the other compliance topics you must address. These could include:

• Anti-harassment and discrimination
• Customer service standards
• Workplace violence
• Workplace safety
• Diversity
• Conflicts of interest
• Fair disclosure
• Bribery
• Reporting violations

It’s also important to go over Health & Safety training to minimize any risks and ensure your staff are safe and informed.

Points covered here could include:

• Employer contact information
• Employer and employee rights and responsibilities
• Sickness policies
• Evacuation processes
• First aid and reporting accidents
• Workplace hazards

Keep your training materials engaging and personal to your employees. Focus on keeping the materials job-specific and relevant, and stress the importance of how serious your company takes their safety.

3. Make It Accessible

Employees are busy and taking them away from their working environment to do their corporate compliance training limits how often you can provide training and the positive impact it will have.

By making your content available online, you’re able to provide 24/7 training, so your staff can keep up-to-date regardless of their location.

You also reduce the risk of regulatory changes being missed as online training programs allow you to update content in real-time. As your practices and policies change, so can your resources. No more waiting around for updated handbooks or keeping employees out of the loop. You want everyone to be on the same page, especially with compliance. Remember, consistency is key.

4. Analyze And Improve

Monitor performance to ensure staff are where they need to be. Analytics that will prove most useful include:

• Engagement rates
• Best performing resources
• Resources that need improving
• Assessment results
• Time logs
• Employees that are performing well or under-performing
• Which devices are used to access the platform
• Satisfaction feedback

These are just a few of the points you should look at to determine the quality of your corporate compliance training materials. As well as easily pinpointing areas of concern, or where there may be a greater risk, analytics also gives both L&D and compliance teams the chance to improve existing training materials to provide more impact and value.

Who is Responsible For Managing Compliance Risk in The Bank?

A compliance department typically has five areas of responsibility—identification, prevention, monitoring and detection, resolution, and advisory. A compliance department identifies risks that an organization faces and advises on how to avoid or address them.

It implements controls to protect the organization from those risks. Compliance monitors and reports on the effectiveness of controls in the management of the organization’s risk exposure. The department also resolves compliance issues as they arise and advised the business on rules and controls.

Compliance officers within the compliance department have a duty to their employer to work with management and staff to identify and manage regulatory risk. Their objective is to ensure that an organization has internal controls that adequately measure and manage the risks it faces.

Compliance officers provide an in-house service that effectively supports business areas in their duty to comply with relevant laws and regulations and internal procedures. The compliance officer is usually the company’s general counsel, but not always.

Industry regulators authorize and supervise compliance rules through investigation, gathering and sharing information and imposing applicable penalties. Factors used to determine risk within an organization include the nature, diversity, complexity, scale, volume, and size of its business and operations.

What is The Purpose of a Compliance Management System?

It’s meant to give you visibility into and control over your organization’s compliance efforts. Without a CMS, you have no easy way to measure or track compliance; and you’re not confident who in your organization is doing what, when or how.

Quite simply it’s a comprehensive compliance program. A compliance management system is an integrated system comprised of written documents, functions, processes, controls, and tools that help an organization comply with legal requirements and minimize harm to consumers due to violations of law.

A compliance management system is woven into every functional area in your organization, from sales to advertising to operations and administration. A good compliance management system can proactively address the risks relevant to your organization while meeting multiple regulatory requirements.

What is Required For Compliance Management

We’ve established that compliance management is important to any business. We’ve also seen that compliance can be non-negotiable (legal compliance) or negotiable (when the standard is not a law).

Below we have listed some things that are required for you to get started with compliance management.

• Get top-down commitment to full legal compliance.
• Initiate a compliance-based risk assessment. It will identify what should be on your compliance checklist.
• Find out how companies similar to yours handle the risks on your checklist.
• Deploy external parties to help you with specialized knowledge as needed.
• Provide compliance training for all relevant employees.
• Allocate responsibilities.
• Tackle non-compliance incidents without delay.
• Set up a system for compliance reporting and record keeping.
• Conduct periodic compliance audits.

What is The First Step in Developing a Compliance Program?

Step 1: Why Leadership Matters

Compliance requires leadership buy-in. Just as an offensive coordinator needs a team’s management to approve plays, so does your compliance manager need your c-suite and Board’s approval.

Leadership sets the overarching tone for compliance. For example, Enron and WorldCom’s unethical activities were the impetus for The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). This regulatory requirement now affects not only public corporations but many smaller businesses.

If leadership sees no value to ethics, the organization’s policy becomes meaningless as enforcement falls by the wayside. In football parlance, upper management becomes the Patriots videotaping the Jets/Giants defensive signals in 2007.

Although not technically illegal, the actions indeed fell outside the boundaries of ethics. If upper management sees no value to compliance, the program renders itself meaningless.

Step 2: How to Appropriately Assess Risk

Organizations must address internal and external risks that potentially compromise their compliance stance. Assessing your organization’s risks means incorporating not only legal risk for noncompliance but also your vendor risks and transaction risks.

Moreover, when reviewing risk, you need to determine what the sector risks apply. For example, an organization may incorporate both the media and hospitality sectors. For example, a luxury resort may choose to include YouTube videos as part of a marketing strategy. While this seems innocuous, if those videos use guest images without the individual’s permission, especially if the guests are children, regulatory requirements impact that strategy.

Risks come from many directions and incorporate many areas of an organization’s business. Understanding the various stakeholders and departments subject to controls can feel overwhelming.

Step 3: How to Establish Standards and Controls

Standards and controls must respond to identified risks. A compliance program should be holistic by incorporating the entire environment in which the organization lives.

For example, a healthcare provider may also accept credit card information for copays. That health care provider needs to determine not only controls surrounding electronic personal health information (ePHI) but also around cardholder information. While overlaps such as endpoint encryption and firewalls may overlap, additional controls, such as data segregation, may also impact the compliance stance.

This interdependence underlies the impact of information organizing.

Step 4: Why Training Matters

Effective compliance programs require employees who not only value standards and controls but understand the reasoning for them. Additionally, training encourages the needed overarching tone that makes a compliance program successful.

Step 5: How the Board and C-Suite Can Provide Oversight

Most compliance programs incorporate ongoing monitoring, auditing, and testing of controls. Referred to as governance, compliance, and risk (GRC), the continued review enables parties to the compliance effort to ensure no gaps exist.

However, monitoring means more than merely reviewing policies and procedures. It also requires organizations to test continually for assurance and to respond to weaknesses. Monitoring often incorporates audit requirements, whether external or internal, as part of the regulatory or industry standard.

These audits, based on tested reviews, then help ensure the Board of Directors through the audit committee remain informed of the organization’s compliance stance.

What Makes a Good Compliance Program?

An effective compliance program includes the development, implementation, and adherence to standardized operational compliance policies, procedures, standards of conduct, safeguards and written guidelines that outlines an organization’s expectations of its employees.

The program should be well-structured, organized and consistent across the organization.  Areas of responsibility should be well defined to ensure accountability.  All staff should be made aware of their compliance obligations through appropriate training and procedures, with the goal being to reduce compliance breaches.

Management Commitment

Central to a successful compliance program is the commitment of managerial and executive staff, without which, an organization will fail to achieve an effective program of compliance.  Managers and the executive should communicate their commitment to compliance by being involved in the provision of resources and allocation of staff to enable the development and successful implementation of the program. 

Adequate training to employees should be provided that clearly indicates the organization’s commitment to a compliance culture; and outlines the roles and responsibilities of employees in order to encourage reporting of breaches.   Compliance activity should be monitored by those in a position of responsibility.

Continuous Risk Assessment

A successful compliance program will have processes in place that will continuously assess the risk of breaches and the impact of that risk on operations. Risks can be grouped into high, medium and low-risk categories, allowing the organization to prioritize areas of focus. 

Part of a risk assessment involves developing strategies to mitigate those risks.  Putting processes, procedures and guidelines in place and having clearly defined roles and responsibilities for staff will aid in risk mitigation.

Written Compliance Program

Having a clearly written, concise, up to date and complete compliance program is essential to the program’s success.  The program should include policies, procedures and guidelines that are easy to follow by all employees.  It should be accessible to all staff and include information regarding the reporting process.

Compliance Auditing and Self-Assessment

When conducting an audit of your organization’s compliance it is essential to first identify the responsible staff members for each compliance subject area that will be reporting back for the audit.  It is essential to create an adequate system for tracking reporting back from staff, which includes providing those staff members with defined time frames for reporting. 

A successful audit will include interviews with relevant staff on questions that have been developed to reflect the organization’s compliance obligations.  The audit should aim to identify any gaps and inconsistencies in operations that can be drafted into an audit report.  

Recommendations should be made based on the results of the audit, with corrective action being taken within a time frame relative to the risk of the gaps or inconsistencies identified.

Compliance Monitoring

A key component to an effective compliance program is ongoing monitoring of all relevant legal obligations.  Organizations should nominate at least 1 individual to have the responsibility for ensuring that the organization is notified of relevant legislative changes and that steps are taken to ensure that the relevant parts of the organization take action to ensure compliance with those changes.

Compliance Management Tools

Not all compliance software is created equal. Some are better for marketing teams, others for data security in financial services, some for training, others for legal. Keep this in mind when choosing the best compliance software for your business requirements.

Best Software for Creative and Marketing Compliance: Ziflow

Ziflow streamlines the review and approval of creative content to help you deliver marketing projects faster by improving collaboration, centralizing feedback, and eliminating manual steps through automated workflows. 

Used by: 

Ziflow is used by creative and digital agencies, marketing agencies, product developers, and video producers across various industries, including Healthcare, Technology, Consumer Goods, Manufacturing, Retail, and Financial Services. 

Customers include Showtime, Splash Worldwide, AWS, Hilton, Weber Grills, WeatherTech, Olly, and Everyday Health.

Key features:

• Automate repetitive review and approval steps to significantly reduce project management effort.
• Track progress of proofs and drill down to see the status of each stage and reviewer.
• Supports hundreds of media types, including AI, PSD, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, JPG, JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIF, TIFF, GIF, and PDF.
• Enables real-time collaboration between team members with threaded comments, attachments on comments, simple thumbs up notations, and mentions.
• Uses version management and comparison to keep track of changes and compare proofs side-by-side using auto-inspection tools.
• Keeps your online proofing projects organized by flexible folders, tailored views and filters, or custom proof properties.
• Integrates with your existing marketing apps, like Slack and Basecamp, to help you complete creative projects faster.
• Employs a robust SOC-2 security program for the safe sharing of proofs internally or externally.

Best Software for Compliance Training: Skillcast

Skillcast is a digital learning platform for managing ethics and regulatory corporate compliance training. Their off-the-shelf course libraries provide compliance training across key topics from bribery, equality, fraud, health and safety to financial crime. Plus, financial services, GDPR, insurance, and risk.

Used by:

Skillcast is used by over 500 leading companies in the UK and beyond to create compliance awareness in their organization. 

Many clients use the off-the-shelf packages, while others engage Skillcast to create fully bespoke content. Some clients use the Skillcast Author platform to develop and deliver the training themselves via the Skillcast Portal.

Key features:

Skillcast has three main offerings:

1. Compliance Course Libraries 

Skillcast has hundreds of courses on key topics, including AML, Bribery, Equality, GDPR, Health and Safety, Information Security, and Risk.

Courses can be quickly customized or translated (by Skillcast or clients) and are accessible to users with a range of disabilities.

2.  Bespoke Training Content 

Skillcast develops bespoke compliance training content tailored to meet individual client requirements.

Skillcast consultants use Intelligent Learning – gamification, personalization, adaptive content, and analytics – to improve learner engagement and maximize the behavioral impact.

3.  Learning Technology and Compliance RegTech 

The Skillcast platform includes an award-winning Compliance Learning Management System (LMS) and innovative RegTech tools.

The LMS enables you to build and deliver all of your digital training content with one-click access to e-learning courses, robust reporting, easy tailoring, and branding, plus options for HR data integration, single sign-on, and more.

The RegTech provides add-on tools for compliance training, policy attestations, assessments, compliance registers, questionnaires, and surveys, and more.

Best Software for Health and Safety Compliance: Donesafe

Donesafe is an all-in-one Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) online platform that allows organizations to enter, access, and report EHS data in real-time. The software suite covers all EHS compliance, plus other functionalities such as supplier and visitor management. 

Used by:

Donesafe works with companies of all sizes across all industries and sectors. There are options to use out-of-the-box/pre-configured templates or build custom templates to align with specific organizational requirements. 

Key features: 

• Remove time-heavy administrative burdens with automations. 
• Configure workflows and forms quickly with the drag-and-drop builder.
• Add logic to make forms smarter with show/hide fields and pre-filled fields. 
• Build custom reports that interrogate any data field within the platform.
   
• Create any number of uniquely tailored dashboards for each job role, site, or individual in your organization.
• Create accountability for strategic goals by measuring and monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Work offline to capture data and sync when reconnected. 
 
• Use custom branding to make Donesafe look like your own product. 
• ISO27001 compliance for added security and reliability.

Best Software for Legal Compliance: Libryo

Libryo is a legal compliance management platform that helps organizations know the law that applies to their business in every jurisdiction. It uses site-specific legal registers to help employees navigate complex regulations with clarity and certainty.

Used by:

Libryo is used by multi-nationals and large corporations in over 75 countries within industries such as banking, energy, supply chain, and more to make sense of regulatory complexity. 

Key features:

• Includes a database of custom legal registers configured to each industry or operation type to deliver tailored content to users.
• Applies regulatory updates and informs users with real-time notifications or emails.
• Keeps all team members aligned and up-to-date with notes to see and action.
• Users can search the Libryo database by topic or keyword to find the information that matters to them.
• Delivers regulations and legal updates in simple, jargon-free language for users who have no legal knowledge.
• Built-in translations ensure that all members of global teams can understand legal requirements.
• Integrates seamlessly with Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) systems, management systems, risk assessments, and audit reports.

Best Software for Data Compliance and Security: Netwrix

Netwrix Auditor is a security solution that helps organizations identify and classify sensitive, regulated, or mission-critical data (including structured and unstructured data), located on-premise or on the cloud.

It also demonstrates compliance with GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, FISMA, NIST, FERPA, CJIS, NERC CIP, ISO/IEC 27001, and other security standards.

Used by:

Netwrix is used by IT operations and IT security teams at financial institutions, healthcare organizations, government agencies, educational institutions, oil and gas companies, plus other verticals.

Key features:

• Reduce the risk to your critical assets by identifying your top data and infrastructure security gaps.
• Automate the data discovery and classification process to protect your most critical assets first.
• Quickly get the information required by management, auditors, and other stakeholders with change, access, and configuration reports.
• Respond to suspicious activity before you suffer data breaches and system failures or get slapped with fines for non-compliance. 
• Spot malicious insiders and compromised accounts with a comprehensive view of all abnormal activity alerts triggered by an individual, including their cumulative risk score.
• Locate the specific pieces of information you require to respond to ad-hoc questions from auditors.

Legal Compliance Software

The Quentic Legal Compliance module helps you correctly fulfill all the duties that arise from extensive ordinances within occupational safety and environmental law. Reduce your liability risk down to the absolute minimum.

The Quentic Legal Compliance module creates a path through the maze of legal texts and helps you determine where your legal obligation to act lie. At the same time, it offers an effective way to ensure that your company is taking a legally compliant approach. Consistent and current data makes sure you are always able to easily prove that all areas of your company are acting in compliance with the law.

Features

• Record important laws, ordinances and policies, including their scope of application.
• Derive obligations to act from legal norms and ensure they are fulfilled.
• Make legal reviews transparent and utilize legal database interfaces.
• Record your facilities centrally and include information about their performance, pressure equipment and water protection needs.
• Plan inspections of facilities and equipment and document the results.
• View all upcoming inspections and applicable deadlines in one place.
• Manage currently held permits, their validity and associated requirements.
• Check assigned requirements, their implementation and the current need.

Compliance Management System For Banks

Quantivate Compliance Management Software for Banks provides a powerful solution for managing a wide variety of regulatory and compliance processes and ensuring accountability throughout banks of all sizes.

The software delivers key features to monitor pertinent regulations and other requirements, organize compliance documentation, run risk assessments, and demonstrate proof of compliance through robust reporting.

Quantivate’s regulatory compliance software can help you:

• Perform a risk assessment on regulatory changes to identify gaps in compliance and determine the priority of implementation.
• Automate tasks and notifications through intuitive workflows.
• Map and apply all regulatory requirements to applicable policies, controls, and processes.
• Demonstrate proof of compliance with comprehensive reporting capabilities.
• Review how compliance changes impact your institution.
• Create and manage any training and/or testing that a compliance change may require.

Compliance Management Framework

A compliance management framework is a critical part of the structure of every company. It can be defined as a set of procedures for organizations to follow to conduct their businesses within the laws, regulations, and specifications. It consists of tools, processes, functions, controls that are written down by the top management and directors of each organization.

For a compliance management framework to be effective, there are certain elements which are necessary as explained below. The four elements are designed for most of the administrative tasks and make all the work in the organization easier.

1. Compliance program

For a business to comply with all the rules and regulations set, there must be a compliance program to follow. The compliance program should have:

• Policies- The policies should be set by the management to be followed by employees in the company. The management should ensure that all entry levels in the organizations follow these policies.
• Processes- Depending on the kind of products or services that the company offers to consumers, there should be a list of the process to be followed to ensure that everything is by the regulations.
• Training- It is essential for organizations to offer training for their employees. Training is done during the hiring process and also when new procedures and rules are being implemented. Training will remind staff members and help them learn new ways of conducting their business.
• Monitoring- There should be a monitoring policy to check if the rules are adhered to. Government or private bodies can do monitoring. The organizations should come up with a monitoring system for all the departments to monitor where the guidelines are not followed.
• Corrective actions- when mistakes are made in the company, there should be corrective actions to ensure that the errors are not repeated. You should note that the lack of compliance in the organization can affect the organization’s reputation and cost a lot of money.

 2. Commitment from the Board of Directors

The Board of Directors in an organization acts as the management oversight of every organization. The management should be committed to integrity that the organization will abide by the laws. Being at the top, they should lead by examples for other junior employees to learn from them.

The board of directors should come up with a code of conduct, communicate the expectations, adopt policies and explain to the staff about the proper compliance function. They should use proper enforcement programs to ensure that everyone in the company observes the compliance guidelines.

The board of directors and management oversight should provide the necessary resources that will allow laws and regulations to be applied in their organization.

3. Consumer Complaint Program

For compliance management framework to be successful, it is essential to know the feedback from consumers. There are several ways in which consumer complaint programs are important.

• Helps the organization to know the products which offer satisfaction and those that don’t. With this, the company will focus more on satisfying the consumers.
• The organization can identify the kind of complaints that customers have towards the company and look for ways to improve on that area.
• Helps the organization to come up with alternatives products or services for consumers if they are not satisfied with the current products.
• The company increases their credibility to their customers once they know that they are concerned about their feedback. Customers are happy when they get instant feedback from the company.
• The organization can reply to the customer’s questions until they are satisfied through the consumer complaint programs. This enhances the reputation of the organization to the customers and the entire market.

Consumer complaint programs use different ways to get feedback from customers. They include social media, reviews, and questionnaires.

4. An audit from an independent body

A compliance audit is a review of an organization’s compliance with the laws and regulations. It also reviews whether there is adherence to the internal policies and implementations. The compliance review should be carried out by an independent body to avoid biased reviews.

Compliance audits should be conducted regularly, and the board of directors should determine how often the audit should be done. The senior management should come up with the scope of the audit and provide the independent body with all the materials and resources required for the audit.

Auditing is essential in every organization as it will help the management to identify compliance risks and ensure that the employees are adhering to the ongoing compliance. In the audit team, it is crucial to have some members of the organization’s monitoring system to ensure that the audit is done correctly.

Once the audit is completed, the reports are documented; gaps identified and come up with corrective actions. The audit reported should be handed over to the top management or the board of directors for further action.

Read Also: What is Qualified Business Income Deduction?

Though it may seem like a lot of work, implementing a compliance management framework comes with a lot of benefits for your business. You will not have to worry about being on the wrong side of the law, have a stable financial department, build a good reputation and identify the right suppliers.

Therefore, as a business owner, if you have not yet implemented a compliance management framework or system, make sure that you do so immediately and start enjoying the results.

Compliance Software Vendors

These top 10 vendors are ranked by their latest annual product revenues attributable to the Compliance market segment.

Rank	Vendor	2018 Compliance Apps Revenues, $M	2019 Compliance Apps Revenues, $M	YoY Growth	2019 Compliance Market Share, %	Recent Developments
1	ADP	Subscribe	Subscribe	15.6%	Subscribe	ADP provides its services to over 860,000 clients, with over 765,000 of those clients on its latest strategic SaaS cloud solutions.
2	Workday	Subscribe	Subscribe	21.4%	Subscribe	Workday serves approximately 7,900 customers globally (includes acquisitions). Workday ended FY’20 with more than 3,200 total customers, up 23% year over year. Recently Workday had more than 190 virtual customer go-lives – consisting of organizations using Workday as the core system of record for finance and human resources. This includes Accenture, which is now live on Workday HCM, with more than 500,000 employees.
3	Ceridian	Subscribe	Subscribe	27.3%	Subscribe	More than 3,700 customers around the world live on the Ceridian Dayforce platform. In 2019, Ceridian sold the two largest deals in Dayforce history: a 140,000-employee quick-service restaurant, and a 60,000-employee professional services company.
4	Equifax	Subscribe	Subscribe	2.9%	Subscribe	Equifax’s products and services serve over 3000 clients across a wide range of verticals. Among Equifax, customers are: US Department of Health and Human Services, HMS Host, EmployBridge, TrueBlue and others.
5	Oracle	Subscribe	Subscribe	7.6%	Subscribe	On the HCM side, Oracle has about 3,000 customers for its Cloud HCM applications primarily for Core HR. Oracle’s ERP and HCM applications reach annualized SaaS revenues of $2.6 billion, up more than 25%. On the on-premise side, Oracle has more than 25,000 customers using products such as E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft.
6	SAP	Subscribe	Subscribe	5.0%	Subscribe	In the HCM market, SAP now has signed 4,000 customers for Employee Central, compared with 2,800 in the third quarter of 2018 and 2,000 in 2017. SAP still has more than 10,000 on-premise HCM applications customers, many of whom also run SAP Payroll on a global level.
7	Businessolver	Subscribe	Subscribe	10.5%	Subscribe	Businessolver’s unwavering service-oriented culture and secure SaaS platform provide measurable success to more than 600 customers worldwide.
8	Paycom	Subscribe	Subscribe	29.2%	Subscribe	Paycom has over 26500 clients, or approximately 13500 clients based on parent company grouping. In 2019, revenues were $738 million, up 30% from the prior year. Paycom retains a stronghold in secondary and tertiary markets that rely on its payroll and HCM applications.
9	BLR Compliance	Subscribe	Subscribe	5.6%	Subscribe	Over 30,000 businesses including Willis HCM, CBIZ HR Outsourcing & Consulting, Able Services, Ron Jon Surf Shop, Hicks, McQuay, Memic turn to BLR for the knowledge, resources, and tools they need to respond quickly in today’s continuously evolving business environment to achieve their financial and strategic goals.
10	ThinkHR	Subscribe	Subscribe	17.7%	Subscribe	ThinkHR and Mammoth HR, merged creating the category leader to drive innovation for clients and partners across the country. Collectively, the companies support more than 350,000 employers nationwide through a network of more than 1,700 partners in the insurance, payroll, HCM software, and professional employer organization (PEO) industries.

Conclusion

We hope the information made the concept of compliance management software clear to you. Now that you know why it should be incorporated into your business’s system, don’t waste your time anymore and find a solution right away.