The Value of Compliance Tracking
In the commercial cleaning and security industries, compliance tracking is crucial for ensuring the delivery of high-quality services on contracts while minimizing risk. It’s an important step in staying up-to-date with regulatory requirements, while maintaining financial health and strong customer relationships.
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.
The goal of compliance tracking is to identify areas where a company may be at risk – financially, ethically, contractually, etc. – so action can be taken to correct it.
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 noncompliance with relevant laws, regulations, industry standards and contractual obligations. This helps lessen the time of resolution for the issue.
- Avoid legal 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 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 can be used as a method of organizing and tracking different information 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 which requires an employee 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 a compliance criteria nears 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 regulations 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 reporting
As a part of compliance monitoring, it’s important to have a clear and understood 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 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 noncompliance
It’s important to note that while your compliance monitoring tools can help you identify noncompliance risk, it can’t enforce compliance.
When you do spot an issue, you can rely on integrated workforce management solutions to help resolve things, though.
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.
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 savings of 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 software is designed to give you information you need to show that you’re in compliance with the latest regulatory needs based on where your business is based. Our solutions help manage your employee, operations and payroll information, and offer easy integrations to even more expert partners for compliance management. Learn more by requesting a demo today.