As an exec, your job is to make important decisions for your company. Striking deals with vendors and contractors and making sure that your projects and operations proceed without a hitch is all in a day’s work for you. To use war analogies, you’re part of the top brass calling the shots and leading your army to victory.
But no war is won by mere orders; there are those who carry out your orders and do the diligent work on the battlefront, and you need to make sure that they have what they need and are in full combat condition all the time. As far as your firm goes, your compliance team and their good work on reviewing each and every certificate of insurance (COI) from all your vendors are all that stands between you and a costly general liability claim.
That being said, it’s in your best interests – and theirs – that your front lines don’t get breached.
Compliance Admins Have it Rough
Simply put, your compliance team is not allowed to make mistakes. There’s simply too much on the line, especially if you’re a small business without that much working capital, or if $70,000 in legal fees is simply not something you can afford. But that’s the thing: your compliance officers are human, too.
Even the most hardworking compliance admins are not above making mistakes or oversights. To reduce risks that come from potential litigation against your company, people on your compliance team have a couple of responsibilities that they need to perform on a regular basis: reading through hundreds of long-form endorsements; collecting COIs, verifying information, and manually entering gleaned data into the firm’s accounting software; checking compliance for each vendor, following up on non-compliant Insured and regularly checking expiration dates, etc. –
All easier said than done, and that’s not even half of the tasks they have to do, sometimes – it seems – all at the same time.
More Pressure, More Errors
And all too often, execs tend to treat these – their firm’s front-liners – as just any other employee, and so inadvertently increase their firm’s risks exposures by overworking their compliance teams. A common scenario, for example, is that they set quotas and deadlines without really understanding the quality-over-quantity nature of the compliance process. This puts on unnecessary pressure on compliance officers, which, on top of their insane workload, leads them to make more errors, not less.
How’s the battlefront at your organization? Are you even aware of how your company’s risks are being managed? Are corners being cut because of inefficient processes and unreasonable quotas?
If you’re going to insist on quotas, you’re going to have to make some improvements to their process. Don’t count on them to streamline and make it more efficient on their own. In the front lines, you think on your feet, especially when you’re constantly preoccupied. Strategy is best made by people who oversee the operations, and in your business’ context, that’s you. It falls on you to pick up their slack and make it a little easier for them.
Compliance Tracking Software Reduces Risks from Costly Errors
We’re talking about improving the accuracy of data in your records by introducing compliance tracking software in your process. By using software like COI Tracker, you can have the most arduous parts of the compliance process automated. Going through COIs, entering data into the system, monitoring Insured compliance levels and constantly keeping an eye for expiration dates – what used to take your admins weeks can now be done in a day.
Through COI Tracker, you can simplify what they do and give them more time to focus on things like eliminating efficiency gaps and carefully reviewing Insurance documents. Of course, you’ll be reducing errors and oversight on their part, too, and by extension, risk on the part of your firm.
COI Tracker can help reduce the amount of your compliance team’s manual processes by up to 50%. Try it today for free and see the difference that it makes for your firm.