We listen to our customers. A lot. It’s that attention to our customers, combined with our deep hands-on experience running compliance efforts, that enables TCT Portal to stand out as the most useful compliance tracking software on the market. How useful is TCT’s integrated suite of tools? We have regular conversations with customers who can’t stop talking about them.
Here’s a look at the tools in TCT Portal that our customers rave about most.
Related reading: 4 Meaningful Business Benefits You’ll Get with TCT Portal
Complete Visibility in One Dashboard
TCT Portal’s Dashboard is one of our most popular tools, because this single feature can realistically eliminate at least 15 man-hours of onerous busywork per month. The Dashboard is your powerful hub for handling all of your compliance management and tracking activities, in one convenient location:
- See every task that’s assigned to you
- View the status of the entire compliance effort at a glance
- Assign tasks to other personnel or share assignments with team members
- View progress week over week as you march to success
If you’re using spreadsheets, you don’t have a good way to gauge where you stand. Are you 50 percent complete with everything? Are you 75 percent? TCT Portal shows you at a glance how far along you are in the process.
The Dashboard and TCT Portal functionality replaces the majority of status call inquiries, nagging follow-ups, and spreadsheet searching. You have all the information you need at your fingertips. Easily see who has what in their hands, and what work they’ve completed each item. What would normally take several hours of going back and forth with people, and doing regular standup meetings, now takes a couple minutes in TCT Portal. Each morning, those with assignments are reminded of them, saving time detailing out separate communication to each team member.
Operational Mode: End the Mad Rush Before an Audit
In some ways, Operational Mode is our hidden gem. Customers who use Operational Mode have waved good-bye to the two or three month sprint before their annual audit. There’s no more rush to gather up evidence that should have been completed months ago, or track down missing documents.
Operational Mode is ideal for companies that need to undergo compliance on an annual basis. These organizations are supposed to be doing several compliance activities throughout the course of the year, such as daily log reviews, quarterly vulnerability scans, semi-annual firewall reviews and annual penetration testing.
What usually happens is procrastination. A couple months before the annual audit, the team goes through an insane sprint of gathering up all their evidence, praying they have it for all of the work they should have been doing throughout the year. The client sends it all over to the assessor to (hopefully) pass their audit — then breathes a sigh of relief, goes back to business as usual and repeats the risky process next year for another exhausting two to three month sprint.
In TCT Portal, Operational Mode automatically notifies you as those periodic requirements come up throughout the year. The tool helps you avoid that chaotic rush of activity and breaks it all down into small chunks that take just a few minutes at a time. When the audit comes along, you already have all of this evidence ready to go. There’s no chaos and no mad rush.
Central Repository: Always Know Where Everything Is
TCT Portal’s central repository eliminates the sprawl of spreadsheets, emails and file shares that characterize most compliance efforts. Scattering evidence to the four winds makes managing compliance a nightmare, because you’re continually keeping track of who’s doing what, when, where it is, and what’s the status. It eats compliance projects alive.
With the Central Repository, you never have to organize your evidence. Every file is automatically stored in one central location and mapped to the requirement(s) you associate it with. Hunting for files is obsolete and it’s always clear if an item is still outstanding. Even when you load up a particular file to the TCT Portal, you can easily find and link existing files, and the software automatically handles document versioning across the entire certification.
Personalized Control for Directional Standards
TCT recently enhanced our capabilities with personalized controls to allow you to define control objectives for any directional certification, within the certification track itself. Before now, you documented your controls and the audit tests in detailed notes in the TCT Portal or in separate attached documents. It was an inelegant solution. This new tool lets you define your control objectives (the requirements to be met) and define how you’re going to test, to ensure that those controls are effective — all within the controls of TCT Portal itself.
These personalized controls can be reviewed, altered, updated and perfected in advance with your assessor, then deployed for gathering of Explanations and Attachments against the Testing Steps. It’s a game changer for organizations that need to maintain compliance for directional certifications like HIPAA or SOC 2.
Requirement Splitting: Get as Granular as You Need
Requirement splitting allows you to handle certain requirements in multiple ways. For example, PCI requires a network diagram for your hosting environment. If your organization is using several facilities, that means several diagrams.
Requirement splitting lets you divide the requirement into different tracking and workflow for each hosting environment. Assign the tasks and responsibilities for each environment to different people. Now you have a completely separate workflow and evidence repository for each environment, and you can track progress at a granular level.
When generating the report, the Portal combines everything together into one entry in the report, with custom labels.
One-Click Report Generation
TCT Portal is gaining a reputation among assessment firms for being the most useful compliance tracking system available. Our report generation tool is a major part of that. The software makes it possible to generate your final report directly from the Portal. There’s no need to manage compliance in one tool, then transfer everything to a Word document and manually produce the report. Instead, TCT Portal is your one-stop-shop for all of your client engagement activities — from client communication to project management to internal quality assurance activities to report generation.
TCT Portal uses the power of automation to transcribe everything that goes into the report template. Click a button, and it’s done!
Handpicked related content: Why Compliance Assessors Are Calling TCT Portal a Lifesaver
Compliance Templates: Why Start from Square One?
Another popular tool among auditors is our Compliance Templates. The templates let you set custom guidance, provide your own examples to clients, and set up default starting positions for certification items. Every time you start up an engagement for that certification, it’ll maintain consistency and start in the same position.
Compliance Templates are easy to configure, and they let you knock out a bulk of the work ahead of time, once and for all — as opposed to doing it all over again for every single engagement. You can configure anything that’s repetitive or common across engagements.
TCT Portal Eliminates the Heavy Lifting
TCT Portal is the most complete software tool available for managing and tracking compliance. We’re able to stand out from the crowd, because we aren’t a software company that builds a compliance tool — we’re a compliance company that understands the needs and daily life of compliance personnel. And we built a tool to address those needs.
TCT Portal is continuously improving. We engage closely with our customers to provide enhanced capabilities to meet your needs, and we’re always looking for ways to make existing functionality better.
TCT Portal is the compliance management tool that will reduce your time and effort, and eliminate your manual heavy lifting.
