8 Common Compliance Pain Points and How To Fix Them

Compliance is an essential part of doing business, and staying compliant can be a challenging task. Many companies face compliance challenges, including finding updated and relevant guidance, expanding into new jurisdictions, the high cost of legal counsel or compliance subscriptions, and anticipating and preparing for pending regulatory changes. We'll look at some of the top pain points identified by our customers and tell you how to overcome them.

Pain-Point #1: Outdated Guidance

Laws are constantly changing, and it can be challenging to know if you're looking at the most up-to-date version that impacts your business. Many available compliance solutions have outdated guidance that isn't human-reviewed. They don't send timely notifications or provide an easy way to highlight changes.

How To Fix: Choosing a compliance solution that stays up-to-date with the latest regulations and sends timely notifications of changes is essential. Verify that you'll receive updates with enough time to factor into your business practices.

Pain-Point #2: Unreliable Results

How do you know that the results you're looking at are comprehensive? Did they undergo any review process before reaching you? Some solutions rely solely on artificially generated, screen-scraped guidance resulting in varying levels of accuracy. Conversely, the platform may have fallen into neglect and is missing critical information.

How To Fix: Choosing a compliance solution backed by experts and using a multi-step attorney review process is important to ensure comprehensive coverage. If choosing an online product, confirm it is regularly maintained and updated.

Pain-Point #3: Too Much Noise

Often, the results you receive aren't customized based on your unique business needs or licenses. The time required to perform such a comprehensive research effort would be staggering in a traditional legal setting, as well as the cost. As a result, the customer must scan through seemingly endless pages to find relevant answers or pay for someone else to do the work.

How To Fix: Look for a solution that customizes results based on your unique business needs and licenses. Ideally, it should allow you to build a profile for your business that informs future guidance.

Pain-Point #4: Not Easy to Build or Update

Many online compliance solutions have a cumbersome product experience or take too long to return reliable results. It's often unclear how to assemble a report with the necessary information, leading to guessing. Results can also take a long time to generate or be challenging to update. With traditional counsel, this can take even longer since you're at the mercy of someone else's schedule and bandwidth.

How To Fix: Choose a reliable compliance platform that's easy to use and quickly returns reliable results. Ideally, this solution is automated so that any changes you make factor into future guidance. Start your legal research here and then loop in counsel for review or to answer questions outside the coverage scope.

Pain-Point #5: Effortless Expansion

Expanding into new jurisdictions by adding new licenses and receiving immediate targeted guidance is complicated and time-consuming. It can also be very costly as it requires due diligence to ensure compliance with the relevant laws of that new state.

How To Fix: Choose a solution that provides targeted guidance based on your current licenses and helps you expand to comply with new regulations. Ideally, it shouldn't charge you for adding additional licenses.

Pain-Point #6: Bloated, Long-Term Subscriptions

Some compliance offerings lock you into pricey, over-stuffed, or long-term contracts that are impossible to modify or cancel. Or, if you're going the traditional route, hefty retainer contracts that strain your budget. You may end up paying for features or services you're not using, and canceling can prove impossible. Finally, if you're being charged per employee, the additional cost can cause hesitation in adding them, slowing down productivity.

How To Fix: Choose a solution that offers a flexible, à la carte subscription model that you can modify as needed. Ideally, the subscription should cover your entire company at a reasonable cost and doesn't nickel-and-dime based on how many accounts you create.

Pain-Point #7: Cost of Doing Business

Legal counsel, while incredibly valuable, is also costly. It's also not required for compliance research tasks where a reliable, automated solution exists. Furthermore, finding a solution that works for all budgets, especially for smaller companies, isn't easy.

How To Fix: Look for a solution with a robust legal toolbox to help jump-start your legal research efforts and offset the costs of outside legal counsel. It's even better if a reputable law firm backs the solution.

Pain-Point #8: Keeping Up With Changes

It's hard to track the sheer amount of pending legislation impacting any business. Building an action plan to implement changes and aligning your team around this goal takes time and effort, regardless of company size. Communication can be delayed or missed, and wires can get crossed, leading to confusion or audits and fines.

How To Fix: Choose a solution that sends you timely notifications of regulatory updates well before they become effective. Give yourself enough time to modify your business practices, and ensure the entire team knows what is changing and how to follow new procedures.

Fixing The Pain Points

All the pain points discussed above can create significant issues for your business and, in severe cases, lead to penalties, lawsuits, or enforcement actions. That doesn't even include the cost of outside counsel to defend your business and reputation.

Winnow addresses these common compliance problems through its automated regulatory change management platform. It allows customers to build highly targeted state and federal law surveys that apply to their specific business needs, products, licenses, and jurisdictions they operate. Results are attorney-reviewed through a multi-step inspection process and provided in a plain-speak manner. It also sends weekly notifications that include a highlighted comparison view for pending changes. Winnow is free to try and offers flexible subscriptions based on company size, not headcount.

Give Winnow a try today, and schedule a demo or call (888) 488-6797.