TCT Portal Is a Lifesaver Right Away — But It’s Even Better in Year 2

The simpler a spreadsheet is, the more efficient it is to work in it. As your spreadsheet becomes more complex, your efficiencies quickly take a nosedive and before long you’re spending hours wading cell-by-cell through complicated tabs and macros, just trying not to break the damn thing.

Compliance management sucks enough as it is — why make it a living hell with manual tools like spreadsheets?

TCT Portal is a compliance management tool designed to make your engagements suck less by streamlining your compliance activities. Imagine cruising through your PCI-DSS or SOC 2 engagement instead of fighting your way through it.

Not only does TCT Portal make compliance management suck less right off the blocks, it actually gets even better in Year 2, when you see another big leap of gains in efficiency.

Immediate Efficiencies in Year 1

You lose hundreds of man-hours simply trying to figure out your current state of things, and meeting to discuss. A single check-in meeting can easily cost 13 man-hours. Assuming your team meets 20 times per year for status check-ins, that’s 260 man-hours. TCT Portal can reduce that time to a grand total of 52 man-hours per year. And that is savings just for status meeting preparation and execution of those meetings!

Meanwhile, you’ll retain immediate visibility into your engagement status, with deeper insights.

This guide will give you the basics of PCI and help you figure out how to make your certification journey as simple as possible.

Even Better Efficiencies in Year 2

That said, your greatest efficiency payoff doesn’t come in Year 1, but in Year 2. When you switch to TCT Portal, your first assessment cycle is spent learning new things and building your repository of information that will benefit you in years to come.

In Year 1, you’re building your repository. In Year 2, you put it into action.

Here’s what I mean by that. Let’s say you’ve been managing compliance without TCT Portal for years. All that time, you’ve been leveraging manual tools like spreadsheets to track your compliance engagements. Spreadsheets are better than nothing, but every year you’ve been losing a ton of valuable information. For example:

• Who was assigned to do what?
• Who actually did it?
• Who provided what evidence?
• When did they provide it?
• Where did they get the evidence?
• Did the Assessor accept the evidence the first time or request changes?
• What changes were made?

Without TCT Portal, all of that detail tends to be lost every year, which means you’re forced to effectively start from Square One. But because TCT Portal captures that valuable data automatically with no additional effort, you’ll never have to start from scratch again.

Your first time through an engagement with TCT Portal, the compliance software is gathering up all that valuable information and storing it in a historical database, so you can easily access it in future years.

A year later, when you can’t remember if the Assessor accepted this evidence or that evidence, or even what exactly was provided in the first place, you can quickly look it up in TCT Portal and see what passed muster. No more guessing games or submitting a document and crossing your fingers that it’s what your Assessor is looking for.

Instead, you have direct access to the exact evidence you leveraged the prior year. That’s huge. You can go back, reference the previous track, find the explanations and attachments you used last time, and view the entire history of your activities.

Nobody on your team has to learn all of those things all over again. Everything is markedly more efficient and easier to handle the second time around, because you have that clear repository of all of your evidence and activity.

New Hires Perform Like Veterans

That repository of information becomes even more valuable when you have new personnel with first-time compliance responsibilities. As you know, changing personnel on a compliance engagement is akin to getting sand in your eye. TCT Portal becomes a life preserver when the newbies get thrown in the deep end, because it provides institutional knowledge that your new people will not have to figure out anew.

With TCT Portal, your new personnel can conveniently look back to the previous year’s records and see exactly what was done. The learning curve is faster, and your new people are far more valuable contributors from the start. They don’t have to run into the same roadblocks and figure out the same problems that your previous staff had to deal with.

As experienced employees leave the organization or get promoted, their expertise doesn’t leave with them. Your new personnel can get onboarded fast so they can work efficiently and productively, even as they’re learning the ropes.

Operational Mode Keeps You Humming

One of the biggest efficiencies that starts in year two is Operational Mode. Operational Mode prompts your internal team to perform maintenance tasks throughout the period until your next annual assessment.

If you’re fairly new to the compliance space, you’ll be surprised how many things need to be maintained on an ongoing basis throughout the year. Operational Mode keeps you on track and ensures that nothing slips through the cracks so you don’t get blindsided with an unpleasant surprise during your next annual assessment.

Operational Mode helps you get fully prepared for your year two run and prepares all the evidence for your Consultants and Assessors ahead of time.

Organizations that use Operational Mode have waved good-bye to the four or five month sprint of chaos before their annual audit. There’s no more rush to gather up evidence that should have been gathered months ago, or track down missing documents. They save time, effort, operational costs, and wasted anxiety.

Exactly How Much Efficiency Are We Talking About?

As you go from year one to year two with TCT Portal, there’s a trove of efficiencies that you get to benefit from. And every year you use TCT Portal, the compliance management system adds to the repository of information, so you’re continually becoming more efficient. But the greatest gains come from Year 1 to Year 2.

But don’t take our word for it.

Exactly how much time and effort — and costs — can your organization save in Year 2 and beyond? Crunch the numbers with our ROI calculator and see for yourself what kinds of savings you could reasonably expect to get from TCT Portal.