Compliance Tracker: Ensuring Quality and Reducing Risk in Commercial Cleaning

By Nina "9" De Forge, Agency Relations Manager, TEAM Software April 24, 2023 Categories:

In the commercial cleaning and security industries, compliance tracking is crucial for ensuring the delivery of high-quality services on contracts while minimizing potential compliance risk. It’s an important step in staying up-to-date with regulatory requirements and compliance tasks while maintaining financial health, strong customer relationships, and an excellent culture of compliance.

What is compliance tracking?

Compliance tracking refers to the process of monitoring and evaluating a company’s adherence to relevant laws, regulations, industry standards, and contractual obligations. It involves tracking activities and documentation to ensure those areas are being met not only at the internal policies level but also at the regulatory compliance level.

The goal of compliance tracking is to identify areas where a company may be at risk—financially, ethically, contractually, etc.—so corrective action can be taken to address them.

What is the benefit of compliance monitoring?

Compliance monitoring should be a component of any company’s risk management strategy. When managed effectively, it can offer several benefits to the organization, including helping a company:

  • Identify areas of non-compliance with relevant laws, regulatory standards, industry standards, and contractual obligations. This helps identify compliance gaps and lessen the time needed to resolve the issue.
  • Avoid legal compliance risk by ensuring the company is meeting all necessary compliance requirements. Non-compliance can open a company up to litigation, fines, and penalties. These can serve as detractors to your financial stability and your company’s reputation.
  • Operate effectively by identifying areas where operations can be improved. By turning these discoveries into maintainable, consistent compliance processes and procedures, you can drive growth long-term.

What is a compliance tracker?

Compliance tracking software helps organizations track and monitor their compliance efforts. Typically, it is a component of a larger software platform which can offer views into compliance using dashboards or alerts and is used to uncomplicate compliance management.

In TEAM Software by WorkWave’s WinTeam ERP solution, for example, a compliance tracker is a module where certain business areas, like HR, can manage certain employee-related criteria for compliance, like licenses and expirations. These are called compliance codes.

How to create and assign compliance codes

Compliance codes and compliance workflows can be used as a method of organizing and tracking different types of information and compliance activities within your business. This can include HR, scheduling, and financial compliance.

For example, within HR compliance, you may want to ensure you have a way to track employees based on what their qualifications, licenses, and certifications include. That way, if you have a contract that requires an employee to be trained or licensed in certain things, you can ensure you are staffing appropriately. In this case, some examples of compliance codes include:

  • CPR training
  • I-9 expiration
  • State licenses
  • Drivers licenses

These criteria include a description, license numbers, expiration date, status, date applied, and other system notes, where fields can be marked as mandatory or not. As compliance criteria near an expiration date, a system administrator receives an alert, ensuring steps can be taken to renew compliance qualifications.

You can also use a compliance tracker as a flexible tool to manage your personnel and operations. For example, you could set up a compliance code to conduct a benefits review and annual performance review. When a due date is scheduled along with the compliance item, a supervisor, employee or both would receive an email notification reminding them to complete the compliance item, depending on how you’ve set up your process.

This kind of tool is incredibly useful to companies where regulatory obligations and requirements change frequently, including meal and rest breaks and pay-to-the-minute compliance needs. A compliance tracking tool can help manage changing needs.

Types of compliance reports

As a part of compliance monitoring, it’s important to have a clear and understood business process for reporting compliance information. This should include clearly built reports that can be consistently run to help you spot areas of noncompliance risk with regularity. Some compliance team reports to keep in mind include:

  • Compliance status reports, for quick data visibility
  • Compliance by employee reports, for at-a-glance updates on expirations and licensing
  • Reports by compliance code to drill down into specific criteria
  • Compliance by job reports, to view specific contract requirements

How to fix areas of non-compliance

It’s important to note that while your compliance monitoring tools can help you identify noncompliance risks, they can’t enforce compliance obligations.

When you spot an issue, you can rely on integrated workforce management solutions to help resolve it.

For example, a customer of TEAM Software by WorkWave uncovered an issue in how work was processed on a federal service contract following a routine audit by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). As a result of this audit, the company needed to identify which employees were impacted over a six-month period and report its findings back to the auditor or risk penalties from the audit during compliance management processes.

Using our business intelligence software, the company was able to come up with the data that was needed, use BI analysis to determine pay corrections and finalize the report in less than 24 hours. The efficiency resulted in a reduction in auditory penalties.

“[TEAM Software by WorkWave’s] BI supersedes anything else that is available in the market. It’s instances like this audit scenario that really solidify its value.” Joe Sordi, Strategic Security Corp.

Get started with TEAM Software and compliance tracking

At TEAM Software by WorkWave, our business intelligence software solution is designed to give you the information you need to show that you’re in compliance with the latest regulatory needs based on where your business is based. Our solutions, as opposed to manual processes, help manage your employee, business operations, and payroll information and offer easy integrations with even more expert partners for compliance management. Learn more by requesting a demo today.

Benefits of Partnering with TEAM Software

In today’s dynamic environment of compliance regulations, maintaining compliance is crucial for organizations striving to avoid penalties and ensure smooth operations. Business intelligence software serves as a versatile tool that can streamline the management of personnel and operational processes. By implementing a structured compliance code, businesses can facilitate important reviews such as benefits assessments and annual performance evaluations. Here are some key benefits of compliance tracking solutions like TEAM Software by WorkWave:

  • Review What Matters: Not all of those, even those operating in the same industry, visualize data similarly. Business intelligence, analytics, and compliance management software allow you to analyze data based on what’s most important to you. With transparent, near-real-time information, you always operate with the latest intelligence to inform your decisions and compliance functions.
  • Get the Full Picture: When it comes to data, the last thing you need is information silos and complicated processes. Business intelligence and analytics software acts as a one-stop-shop for your business data, integrating the information you already have from all your systems so you get the full picture of your business more easily.
  • Put Insight into Action: Without the right tools to analyze performance and features like real-time monitoring, you risk being data-rich and information-poor. Our software helps you dig deeper into data to identify trends and insights through data visualizations or more complex reporting tools, so you know when—and how—to act.

Closing Thoughts

To thrive in today’s regulatory landscape, entire organizations must prioritize compliance tracking and start implementing compliance management systems into their dynamic process. By leveraging TEAM Software by WorkWave, you can streamline your operational processes while ensuring adherence to necessary regulations. Our business intelligence software not only simplifies the management of employee, operational efficiency, and payroll information but also integrates seamlessly with expert partners to enhance compliance oversight. Request a demo today!