The most popular compliance management system on the market today isn’t TCT Portal. Not even close. It’s a software application that’s easy to set up, free to implement, and familiar enough that nearly everyone in an office environment knows how to use it. Most people track their compliance efforts in spreadsheets…and they hate it.
But what else is there? TCT Portal compliance management system outperforms spreadsheets in every single area — including cost. Let’s take a blow-by-blow look at the advantages TCT Portal offers over spreadsheets.
TCT Portal vs. Spreadsheets
Cost
Spreadsheets: Out-of-pocket expenses may be zero, but the indirect cost of spreadsheets are very expensive to your organization. Because spreadsheets are manually intensive and incredibly inefficient, they actually add hundreds of man-hours per year, for each certification you go up against. The monetary cost is thousands of dollars annually. Productivity costs and opportunity costs may be incalculable, but they’re real.
TCT Portal: TCT’s compliance management system is priced so that virtually any company that needs to maintain compliance can afford it without difficulty. On top of that, the ROI with TCT Portal is so incredible that you have to run the numbers yourself to believe it.
Calculate your ROI with TCT Portal
Security
Spreadsheets: Over the years, Excel has dramatically improved the quality of its security. But it still doesn’t measure up to enterprise-grade security and compliance standards. When you’re dealing with data that’s as sensitive as your vulnerability scans, penetration testing, network diagrams and internal inventory, spreadsheets don’t make the grade.
TCT Portal: Because TCT Portal is designed to manage compliance for any certification, we built the platform to meet the most rigorous security standards out there, maintained via TCT Portal itself. Welcome to a whole new world of enterprise-grade security with TCT Portal.
Hiring the right C3PAO is only one small piece of successfully navigating the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification. Get fully equipped with TCT’s online guide to CMMC.
Data protection
Spreadsheets: Excel gives you several ways to protect your data, but none of that protection is robust. It doesn’t take much for a spreadsheet to get littered with bad data. Every keystroke is an opportunity for an unspotted error, and a single data entry on the wrong row can throw off the entire sheet. If you’re collaborating with others, the opportunity for inaccuracy skyrockets (more on that below).
TCT Portal: TCT Portal is built to ensure the right data is in the right spot. Several safeguards are in place to protect your data:
- User-specific permissions
- Automated functions
- Specific locations for particular types of information
- Version control and data recovery
- Data encryption in flight and at rest
Ease of use
Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets are easy to use when you’re tracking simple sets of information. They’re quick and easy to set up, they’re familiar, and there’s no need for IT support. But for compliance management, spreadsheets become unwieldy behemoths before you know it. Compliance data isn’t a simple matter of entering file names into a spreadsheet. It’s hundreds of rows and hundreds of columns, multiple tabs, cross-referencing, and detailed notetaking. A spreadsheet quickly becomes excruciating to maintain, especially across the number of internal personnel and vendors involved in the process.
TCT Portal: TCT Portal isn’t a ubiquitous system like spreadsheets are, which means there will be a learning curve. But unlike spreadsheets, the compliance management software very quickly becomes easy to use.
Plus, TCT provides plenty of instruction and help, including:
- Onboarding training sessions
- How-to videos
- Release notes
- Personal one-on-one support team help
We take seriously our mission to help others (especially our clients). You’ll get all the help you need so you can get proficient with TCT Portal as quickly as possible.
Collaboration
Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets aren’t designed for collaborating — especially Excel, which is primarily an offline application. Sharing a static spreadsheet with multiple team members usually means each person is making their own copy, entering their own information, then sending it to a point person who has to merge it all back into one file. That’s a lot of additional man-hours. It also creates more opportunities for data entry errors, and you’re likely to have conflicting information from multiple team members.
TCT Portal: TCT Portal is designed specifically for team collaboration. Simply assign each item to a specific person, and track their progress natively in the application. Team members work only on the items assigned to them, and every piece of information is entered only once. It’s abundantly clear who is responsible for what, clear history of who did what and there’s no redundant effort from multiple people.
Project management
Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets weren’t designed to manage projects. It’s common for team leaders to spend two to five hours BEFORE every status meeting digging through their spreadsheets, simply trying to ascertain the state of the project. Status meetings themselves can take a good 90 minutes or more.
TCT Portal: Our clients report glancing at the TCT Portal dashboard a few minutes before status meetings since the data is presented LIVE. No hunting for status, wondering if a team member did their assigned task since last week. Meetings themselves take 15 to 30 minutes. That’s because the compliance software lets you:
- View real-time status at a glance
- Automate status updates
- Assign tasks
- Send and store email communications
- Automate reminders to team members on open items
Discover how to check compliance status in less than 15 minutes
Data storage & organization/evidence collection
Spreadsheets: With a spreadsheet-based system, you have to store the actual evidence somewhere separate and manually record its location in the spreadsheet. Copy the location wrong — or move the file and forget to update the sheet — and who knows how long it’ll take to find the evidence.
TCT Portal: Store the evidence within the platform and the software lets you access it in one click. TCT Portal allows you to reference existing evidence instead of duplicating your storage, and it acts as a data repository tp automatically handle things like documentation versioning and updates. Couldn’t be simpler!
Report generation
Spreadsheets: Report generation is painful with a spreadsheet system. Copy data cell by cell into a Word document, and spend dozens of hours reformatting it to fit the report template.
TCT Portal: TCT Portal automatically exports report data and formats it appropriately. All you have to do is click a button. Seriously — click one button. We recently had a demo participant literally giggling to themselves when we showed them this functionality.
The Winner, and Still Champion
Most organizations are addicted to their compliance tracking spreadsheets. As much as they hate struggling with them, they have a hard time letting go. But TCT Portal makes it easy to kick your spreadsheet habit.
Managing compliance complexity has never been so easy with one secure, convenient, automated place to manage it all. Escape the endless spreadsheet hassles and start making compliance suck less, with TCT Portal.
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