Why Your Free Compliance Management Tool Is Costing You a Fortune

“Why the hell would I go and spend money on a compliance system? I’m already paying my compliance team and our spreadsheet application is already paid for, so it doesn’t cost me anything.”

This is the reality that many executives are living in. They see a long column of expenses under their compliance program, totaling tens of thousands of dollars every year, which is not directly tied to revenue. Their compliance programs are expensive cost centers, and every time they add another standard (such as HIPAA, ISO 27001, PCI) to the mix, it gets more costly.

Understandably, the last thing they want to do is purchase a software system that does the same thing their free spreadsheet application is doing today. But compliance management is a painful process — especially if you have to comply with multiple standards or deal with complex scenarios. 

How can you balance financial responsibility with greater compliance efficiency?

The Status Quo: Why Organizations Settle for “Good Enough”

To deal with the pain of compliance management — and avoid additional expenses — organizations tend to adopt one of the following solutions.

Manual Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets hold several advantages, especially for business-minded executives. They’re inexpensive (or free), versatile (especially as new standards are added to the compliance program), and with some help are able to run basic automation scripts.

However, spreadsheets are also heavily labor intensive, especially as your compliance program becomes more complex. They can easily be corrupted, and complex spreadsheets are incredibly difficult to use easily — especially when you have numerous stakeholders attempting to update the same spreadsheet. It takes blood, sweat, and tears to hold the program together. Eventually, your spreadsheet system becomes an unusable rat’s nest of information that takes hours of manual labor just to determine your current status on the engagement.

Can it be done? It is possible — I did it myself for years. And it was that experience of having to do it completely manually that sent me packing. Soon after, TCT was founded and because of my background in application development and boots on the ground experience, I went about solving for a better way to manage compliance.

Often, executives don’t have any clue what kind of hell their team goes through to keep the organization compliant. The leadership walks in at the beginning of the engagement, issues the charge to get compliant by a certain date, then walks out and waits for final reports.

Suddenly the compliance team and all of the control owners are dashing off in a hundred different directions, putting in tons of overtime hours, and stressed as hell trying to hold it all together. The mere act of determining status in advance of the weekly internal and Assessor meetings is a multiple hour endeavor. The engagement is characterized by dropped balls and sweating bullets as they pass their evidence onto the Assessor, hoping they didn’t miss anything along the way. 

Often, business leaders see that they’re already paying the licensing fees for using spreadsheets and believe that using free software doesn’t cost anything. They couldn’t be more wrong.

There’s another way of looking at it. Consider how much opportunity cost (in the form of time) is being wasted because your team is using massively complex spreadsheets. 

Homegrown Automation Systems

Some organizations seek to keep costs low while automating aspects of their compliance program. These companies tap their programmers to create a basic software app that helps the compliance team streamline their processes. They add bits of automation into the manual process, such as writing scripts into a spreadsheet or writing scripts to move files from one location to another. Some organizations have even gone so far as to write internal database applications to help carry the compliance load.

To varying degrees, this homegrown internal automation system works. But there’s a tradeoff. If you’re maintaining your own system, your compliance personnel are now dependent on the programmers within your organization. Your programmers typically have higher organizational priorities in their daily work, and it isn’t their top priority to maintain, update, or fix bugs in your homegrown system. 

When certification authorities update the compliance standard, your internal system suddenly becomes out of date. And it will stay out of date until the programming team has time to kill, which isn’t likely to be anytime soon.

Now you’re stuck with a homegrown system that’s sort of working, but it isn’t optimized, and you can’t get anyone to fix it or update it to the latest version of the compliance requirements. This circumstance often has the compliance team reverting to the spreadsheet based system we discussed earlier.

Calculating the True Cost of “Free” Compliance Tools

In all of these cases, the bottom line is that your compliance team is inefficient and wasting time — and that makes your compliance program more costly than it needs to be. 

The person running your compliance program is a high-paid resource. They’re interfacing with control owners, who are also expensive resources. So you have wasted time with the compliance program itself, wasted time with expensive people resources, and wasted time as your programmers are diverted from their priority work to build or maintain a suboptimal system that isn’t as efficient as it could be.

It’s costing your company real money, because all of these people should be spending their time doing work that’s more valuable. We’ve all heard the expression that time is money, which is absolutely the case here.

Another Option: Third-party Compliance Tools

There’s a third option available: invest into a third-party software tool that’s specifically built to make compliance management more efficient. 

Why would you spend money on yet another tool, when you’re trying to reduce your costs? Because there’s a compliance management solution out there that can reduce your operational costs so well, you’ll see greater margins as a result of using it.

TCT Portal Delivers Real ROI, Real Savings, Real Results

We recently walked a prospect through TCT’s ROI Calculator to show them all the ways where they can regain wasted time (and thereby money) on their compliance engagements. They said, “We’ve been looking at a number of compliance tools, and nobody has bothered to show us how their system will actually save us money and time.”

TCT Portal can help you reduce your time and effort on compliance management by as much as 65 percent, allowing you to regain thousands of dollars in lost operational costs every year. And our ROI Calculator shows you exactly where you’ll regain those dollars.

TCT’s ROI Calculator is based on real numbers, not smoke and mirrors. You should try it out yourself. And once you see the data, realize the gravity of the savings, you can begin to envision better uses for investing the time and money savings back into your company.

It’s not uncommon for a typical TCT customer to save over 550 hours per year — more than a full quarter of a person for a year! Assuming an average salary of $80,000, your business immediately becomes more profitable by more than $20,000 per year. 

This kind of ROI gives you brand new freedom to redeploy resources so they can do higher priority work. This can open up new opportunities for greater productivity or new initiatives. You can even use the operational costs you’re saving to hire additional staff. 

How much more productive could your company be if you had an extra $20,000 to play with and an extra quarter in your year? How much more revenue could that time and money generate for your company? 

If your organization has some manner of complexity to their annual compliance engagement (multiple applications, locations or standards) then you stand to recoup much more time (and money) on your engagement. The coolest part is that the ROI calculator is a tool you can use to run scenarios that are specific to the circumstances of your own organization.

Maximum Efficiency Across Every Standard

TCT isn’t limited to one standard or a handful of standards. The system is easily adaptable to every industry standard in existence. We realized early on that it doesn’t make your job easier if you have multiple standards that require their own dedicated tool, because that only adds inefficiencies and makes your job more difficult.

Instead, TCT Portal allows you to efficiently manage all of your certifications and standards within one simple system, for maximum time and cost savings. TCT Portal is already set up for more than 85 families of compliance standards — but if you have an obscure industry standard framework you need to comply with that isn’t already set up in TCT Portal, we’ll load it up into the system for you, at no charge.

TCT Portal is the compliance management solution that makes life better for compliance professionals and control owners. It makes life better for your support and technical personnel, because they don’t have to carry an additional load. It reduces stress, makes people happier and more effective, and it recovers wasted time and money.

Not All Compliance Tools Are Created Equal

Some compliance tools make grand promises that come with big price tags. They promise that their system can do everything you can imagine at the click of a button — if you’re willing to pay for it. But “Just sign up with us and we’ll take care of it for you” usually means you should expect to give up your own workflow and force your processes to fit into someone else’s square hole.

Don’t Force Your Complex Compliance Program to Fit Someone Else’s Software

If someone makes it sound like you’ll be able to sit back and sip on a Mai Tai while your compliance program runs itself, know that that simply won’t come to reality — but it will come with a giant price tag. 

Certain aspects of compliance management will always suck. There will always be some amount of manual work and some amount of stress to deal with. But TCT Portal makes compliance management suck less — and it does so better than the others.

Start Recovering Wasted Profits

For over a decade, we’ve worked side-by-side with security and compliance professionals, making their lives continuously better. TCT is always open to feedback from our users to make the system even better. 

As a result, TCT Portal is the compliance tool that gives compliance professionals the solutions they need most, so they can manage their compliance engagements more efficiently and more profitably.

Discover for yourself what TCT Portal’s ROI will look like for your company.