More and more assessment firms are realizing that the old way of managing and tracking compliance engagements just doesn’t cut it. Running off of spreadsheets and word processing programs can only get your company so far.
Meanwhile, other firms are turning to compliance automation software. As a result, they’re gaining more clients and turning larger profits.
TCT Portal compliance software was designed to help you take your company to the next level. Here’s why no other solution can match its effectiveness.
Built for Compliance
TCT Portal was designed to track and manage compliance, from the ground up. Every activity you need to perform as part of your engagement is covered in TCT Portal — and automated, wherever possible. What’s that mean for you?
It means you’ve got one single place to go for all of your compliance activities. No more cobbling together multiple platforms that only do part of the job — and poorly at that. No more bouncing between applications that don’t integrate. No more hunting down files or information that’s hiding in some obscure location.
TCT Portal is your high-performance engine that’s designed specifically for driving compliance engagements. And it puts you in the driver’s seat.
Less Work, Do More
Compliance assessments seem to have built-in roadblocks and potholes that force you to move at a snail’s pace through molasses. Whether it’s wonky workarounds in your templates, clunky workflows, or manual drudgery, an engagement can easily take much too long to complete. You’re working hard to get little done.
The best way to streamline your compliance engagements is by automating them with TCT Portal. When you implement TCT Portal, you get a complete, efficient compliance management process that reduces your man-hours by as much as 25 percent (details on that below).
Everything from accountability reminders, to consolidated communication, to standardized evidence submission and storage location are built into the compliance management software. Tracking and status updates are automatically available in real time. It’s an elegant solution that seamlessly works with your compliance management activities.
How can TCT Portal streamline your compliance process? Here are the highlights:
- Know your status in real time. Our live dashboard is updated in real time, so you see the live state of your whole team involved in the workflow (internal personnel, service providers and assessors).
- Link your documentation to related requirements. Link similar evidence across your certification, connected at the requirement level, keeping all your document management in sync. Document versioning is included.
- Prompt your people automatically. Tired of hounding people for documentation? Our compliance tracking software sends automated reminders.
- Use one submission method. TCT Portal gives you a single submission method that’s easy for everyone.
- Store everything in one place. Just go to your instance of TCT Portal, and all the evidence is right where it needs to be. Communication is right there, with a full history of each requirement. Cue the Angels singing.
- Consolidated customer guidance. Instead of answering the same questions repeatedly for clients, update your proprietary guidance to your clients once, and they all see the updates. Train your clients to look at the guidance before coming to you with questions. Clients are pleased, and you’re more efficient.
With TCT’s compliance automation software, you’re freed up to give your clients real help and answer their questions in depth (don’t forget to update your guidance). You have the time (and energy) to invest into your client so that they can be more self-sufficient with compliance—which comes back around to making your job easier and making the client happier!
Real-time Status
Start each client touchpoint meeting with an accurate view of exactly where the assessment stands. If you’re managing your client assessment engagements in Excel spreadsheets, you’ve got a lousy progress tracking tool — and hours of manual status updates before each client meeting.
TCT Portal uses automation to give you all the information you need at a glance, without any work on your end. When you check the status of anything in TCT Portal, you’re looking at live data. There’s no manual updating. No last-minute scramble before the status meeting. The compliance software automatically updates the status whenever there’s any kind of activity in the system. You can see it in real time.
Everyone on your client’s team can filter the view to see only the items they’re responsible for. They’ll immediately know what’s on their plate, and what the status of each item is. No more line items slipping through the cracks, getting lost in the jungle of spreadsheets between the names of other team members!
With TCT Portal, you’ll still need status calls, but now you’re spending no time figuring out where things stand. Instead, you’re getting directly to why your client hired you — to help them navigate the waters and gain the benefit of your expertise. You can instantly go into the certification and look at everything that’s happened since the last meeting. There’s no wasted time trying to figure out each item—and there’s no need for prep time, either!
Instead of trying to figure out the status of every outstanding line item, you can spend your call quickly addressing a few items that need to be discussed and jumping into accountability and issue resolution.
Faster and Easier Reporting
Spending hours of manual copy/pasting and reformatting your engagement reports? TCT Portal saves countless hours with easily generated, ready-to-go reports in seconds—with just a mouse click.
Excel doesn’t let you generate the reporting you need when you’re done with your process. It’s a lot of manual work, and it’s difficult to share the data among assessors and QA. Online Business System’s principal consultant Sherri Collis said, “What our assessors really wanted was a way to take their notes—and to have the notes generate the actual final report.”
With TCT, once you enter all the information, you simply click a button and the compliance software generates the Report on Compliance / Attestation of Compliance for PCI, with out-of-the-box reporting for other standards. Multiple people can contribute to the same report, too.
Case Study: Assessment Firm Breezes Through Client Engagements
Recovered Costs, Bigger Profits
I had a conversation with an assessment firm a couple years ago. They were committed to their Excel spreadsheets because they had invested all kinds of time and money into making their system work. Not because their spreadsheets were better, but because they’d already spent so much to get them working. It’s natural to get married to things you’ve invested heavily in. But this firm was blowing time on every single engagement, and it was stifling their business growth. (Interestingly enough, that firm has come full circle and are now implementing TCT Portal.)
Assessment firms that use TCT Portal see an impressive return on their investment that frees them up to grow the company. Simply switching to TCT Portal recovers enough costs and boosts enough profits to scale your business.
How much of an ROI is possible? You’d be surprised. Let’s look at the numbers.
Handpicked related content: See the Time and Money You’ll Recover with TCT Portal
ROI of TCT Portal
Let’s say a typical compliance engagement takes 200 man-hours. Let’s also assume you’re charging $30,000 per engagement, and paying assessors $55 per hour. At $50 per month per engagement, TCT Portal will pay for itself if it reduces each engagement by just 11 hours—that’s a 3.7 percent time savings. If TCT Portal can cut your inefficiencies by even four percent, you’re increasing your profitability.
NOTE: These estimated numbers are intentionally very low. If your typical engagement takes longer than 200 hours and is charged at higher rates than we quote above, you’ll see even greater returns with TCT Portal.
So what kind of ROI can you reasonably expect from TCT Portal? Let’s break it down. Here’s a typical scenario:
| Activity | % of Overall Engagement | Engagement Time Without TCT Portal | Engagement Time with TCT Portal | % Savings |
| Customer onboarding | 5% | 10 | 6 | 40% |
| Active engagement | 20% | 40 | 35 | 13% |
| Data collection | 45% | 90 | 60 | 33% |
| Onsite | 10% | 20 | 16 | 20% |
| QA | 10% | 20 | 16 | 20% |
| Report writing/ generation | 10% | 20 | 16 | 20% |
| Total | 100% | 200 | 149 | 25% |
On average, TCT Portal’s ROI is nearly 6x the four percent you need for a positive return! What kind of business opportunities that could mean?
Growing Your Business with TCT Portal
If an engagement with TCT Portal gives you a 25 percent savings, that means after four engagements, you’ve saved enough time to do a fifth one. Assuming the average assessor can tackle eight engagements in a year using your current system, TCT Portal would give you 10 engagements per assessor. How does that translate to profit?
Let’s say each of those two additional engagements is worth $30,000. You’ve just earned an additional $60,000 per year — per assessor. If you have ten assessors in your firm, TCT Portal has helped your firm achieve over half a million dollars of top line growth in just one year!
Run the Numbers for Your Company
This is just a generic example, and the numbers don’t match your assessment firm. That’s why we developed an ROI calculator that you can use to see for yourself how much money you can recover with TCT Portal. Enter the actual numbers for your organization and see what kind of time and cost recovery you could realistically gain with the portal.
See What TCT Portal Can Do for Your Firm
Struggling to manage your assessment engagements better? TCT’s compliance management software helps streamline the compliance assessment process, so you can focus on helping your clients succeed—not wrestling with substandard tools and approaches.
That’s why we priced TCT Portal so affordably—the decision should be an absolute no-brainer for every assessment firm. The net result is that you’re saving time, generating greater profits, making clients happier, and growing your business more effectively.
