A compliance manager’s guide to audit-ready policy systems
- Dan Hawtrey
Compliance isn’t getting any easier
Compliance managers have always had a lot on their plates, but in recent years, their workload and the demands placed on them have only increased. Research from Regology shows that 92% of compliance professionals believe their job has become more difficult.
One of the core reasons for this is a more complex regulatory landscape. The latest PwC Global Compliance Survey finds that 85% of compliance and governance leaders believe compliance requirements have become more complex over the past few years. And this means it is harder for compliance teams to stay on top of everything: the Regology survey finds that nearly 44% of compliance professionals struggle to keep up with regulatory changes.
More complex and faster-evolving compliance requirements ramp up the pressure on compliance teams, not only because of stakeholder demands but also because there has not always been investment in additional team members or technology to handle the extra workload. Nervous executives stress the urgency of compliance, but compliance teams are required to do more with fewer resources.
Audit challenges with compliance policy management
The sharp end of greater compliance complexity and resourcing challenges is often felt in audits. Compliance audits can feel like a tightrope walk, partly because there is a lot to cover, but also because you have to rely on the actions of people around the business who are already “maxed out”, yet responsibility ultimately falls on your shoulders. The result is that some audits are stressful rather than straightforward for compliance teams.
There are also particular challenges relating to policy management, especially in providing evidence required for an audit to show that staff have read policies and procedures. Some compliance teams still have to rely on manual or partly manual approaches, sending emails to have employees confirm they have read a policy and then logging the replies in a spreadsheet.
There may also be a similarly painful manual exercise in asking policy owners to ensure their policies are up to date.
Resorting to manual approaches leads to multiple problems:
- Compliance teams burn vast amounts of time on mindless admin, inevitably making the audit a “mad scramble” to get everything done.
- There is a greater risk of errors and things getting missed, for example, with policies that aren’t up to date, or disappointing low compliance rates around reading mandatory policies.
- Reporting remains manual and even unconvincing, so compliance is not strongly verified for the auditors.
- There is an absence of audit trails or logs relating to policy management.
- The whole audit experience leads to frayed nerves for the compliance team and potentially for your senior leaders.
What is an audit-ready policy system?
But compliance audits don’t have to be stressful.
An audit-ready policy system or software provides peace of mind across all aspects of policy management for an upcoming audit. It means everything is in place and up to date for policy management.
More broadly, it is a compliance automation platform: one that removes manual effort and human error from policy lifecycle management, replacing spreadsheets, email chains and ad hoc processes with automated, auditable workflows.
All the associated challenges of an audit around manual reporting, the mad rush to gather evidence, and the heightened risk of errors are gone, thanks to a combination of automation, relevant features, and the right bells and whistles.
What does an audit-ready policy system look like?
An audit-ready policy solution such as Xoralia will tick several critical boxes.
Organisations that rely on manual compliance processes that are cumbersome, error-prone and never scalable will never be audit-ready. An audit-ready policy system has automation at its core in most areas, including reporting, notifications, reminders, workflows and more.
The practical benefit for compliance managers is significant: less time spent on repetitive admin, fewer things falling through the cracks, and a much stronger audit position.
An audit-ready policy system must provide employees with easy access to policies so they can be found and accessed at the point of need without difficulty or barriers. Strong user adoption is at the centre of any effective policy management tool. A product like Xoralia does this through:
- A central policy library that is easy to access.
- Single sign-on (SSO) and seamless integration with Microsoft 365 and Teams.
- Powerful search facility and the ability to browse using custom filters, with an AI-powered bot that can answer employee questions about policies directly.
- Personalised views tailored for different groups – admins, policy owners and users.
- Configurable web parts covering different scenarios to embed polices into SharePoint sites or your SharePoint intranet.
Employee attestation remains the best way to demonstrate that employees have read and agreed with policies and any related updates, particularly those that are mandatory. Reporting then can show the level of compliance across your organisation. Audit-ready policy software supports employee attestation with an out-of-the-box feature to enable employees to confirm they have read a policy, similar to a digital signature.
Critically, this replaces the time-consuming manual process of chasing confirmations and logging responses, and gives you defensible, timestamped evidence that will hold up under audit scrutiny.
Ultimately, you need to have easy, comprehensive reporting in place to demonstrate compliance with employee attestation, mandatory reads, policy updates, and so on. Xoralia even offers custom quizzes and e-learning to demonstrate that employees understand policies and policy updates.
Real-time dashboards give you an at-a-glance view of completion rates and outstanding actions across the organisation, so you always know exactly where things stand.
An audit-ready policy system must be fully secure, but also be able to tick various boxes if it comes under scrutiny through the audit process itself, with:
- In-built audit trails and compliance logs.
- Granular access control for admins, but also to define responsibilities for each policy.
- Robust version control to reduce the chance of multiple versions of policies circulating.
- The ability to enforce templates for different types of policies.
- Custom workflows to ensure new policies or updates involve the right stakeholders and experts.
Ready for your audit? That requires your actual policies always to be up to date and actively managed, and for you to be able to demonstrate this. An audit-ready policy management system will have in-built publication, review, and approval workflows for policy owners and reviewers, which can be configured at the individual policy level if required. Xoralia customers tell us that these workflows are essential for keeping policies up to date.
The outcome is that you can walk into any audit confident that your policies reflect the current regulatory position, without having scrambled to update them at the last minute.
An audit-ready system doesn’t just help you manage the compliance process internally. It also equips you to report upward with confidence. Compliance managers increasingly need to produce board-level reports and risk summaries that demonstrate the organisation’s compliance position to senior leaders and executives.
An audit-ready policy system makes this straightforward, providing ready-made data and reporting outputs that translate policy management activity into clear, credible evidence of compliance health, without hours of manual data collection beforehand.
The benefits of being audit-ready
Being audit-ready has multiple benefits.
The power of audit-ready policy management
When you’re audit-ready, you’re in a position of strength and back in control of policy management. A solution like Xoralia is essential to achieving audit readiness and positioning your compliance function as a modern, automation-led operation rather than a reactive, manual one.
If you want to see what an audit-ready policy system looks like in action, then book a free Xoralia demo.
Frequently asked questions
What is an audit-ready policy solution?
An audit-ready policy solution is software that ensures organisations are always ready for upcoming compliance audits in policy management. It means that policies are all up to date, there is evidence that employees have read and understood them, and critical elements are in place, such as audit trails.
What are the main elements of an audit-ready policy management solution?
An audit-ready policy management solution typically provides easy access to policies for employees, attestation features to verify that employees have read the policies, comprehensive reporting, workflows to support policy lifecycle management, and automation to eliminate inefficient manual processes.
What are the benefits of being audit-ready?
Being audit-ready reduces the stress associated with compliance audits, removes manual effort and saves time, lessens the risk of errors, and ultimately supports better regulatory compliance. It can also help foster a culture of compliance and free up time for compliance professionals.
How policy management software can help
We think the best place to store your policies is inside SharePoint. Most companies already have SharePoint as part of their Microsoft 365 subscription. Using SharePoint means you have full control of your policies, and many best practices can be achieved right out of the box. However, there are gaps and certain best practices are hard to achieve.
To fill these gaps, and for best results we recommend using purpose-built policy management software for SharePoint and Microsoft 365.
We’ve developed a dedicated solution called Xoralia (pronounced Zor-ra-lee-a) that will ensure you have the best overall approach to policy management, supporting your users, policy owners and administrators.
We learned all about policy management from many years of building custom solutions for our clients on SharePoint. But we kept coming up against the same challenges, mostly caused by feature gaps in SharePoint. One day, a client asked us to build a policy management tool that filled these gaps. The trouble was, they didn’t have a lot of budget. But we had a good relationship with them and so we decided to collaborate on it provided we got to keep the code. Looking back, it was a pretty simple tool but over the years we have added more features and relaunched it. We’re now on version 3 and our original customer is still using it!
3 benefits you can expect from Xoralia
Make it easy to find policies
Centralised policy library with powerful search and filtering
Reduce administrative burden
Automations and notifications so that all policy tasks are carried out on time
Demonstrate compliance and best practice
Sophisticated tracking and dashboards to drive and measure compliance.
And lots more!
What our clients say
A great time saver and tool for document management
We have found Xoralia to be very beneficial to us as it has allowed us to focus on other area’s as Xoralia will take care of who has read the documents and notify them if they have not. A great time saver and tool for document management all together.
Tim Galer
IT Coordinator
Hughes
Ideal partner for our regulated environment
LifeArc operates in a strictly regulated sector where compliance and information security are critical. It is essential that LifeArc’s workforce have easy and effortless access to the latest up-to-date policies and procedures, which is the structure Xoralia gave us.
Adam Lythgoe
IT Manager
LifeArc
How to get started with Xoralia
Step 1: Explore or request a demo
Start a free trial for instant, hands-on access, or fill out our form to book a personalised demo at a time that suits you.
Step 2: Get a price proposal
If Xoralia looks right for your organisation, ask us for a tailored quote. We’ll outline any options and packages to fit your needs.
Step 3: Install and launch
Set up Xoralia in your environment with our support. We’ll provide onboarding, training, and full assistance to get your team up and running quickly.
Here's what you'll get
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Central policy library
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Search and filter tools
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Mandatory read policies with attestations
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Quizzes
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Notifications and alerts
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Employee dashboard
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Line manager dashboard
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Works on mobile, in Teams and SharePoint
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New policy creation workflows
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Policy update workflows
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Review and approval gates
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Policy version history
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Compliance dashboard
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Audit trail
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Full reporting
And last but not least:
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Professional implementation service and support
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Evergreen software – frequent updates and improvements
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Comes with our "it just works" support warranty – we’ll fix any bugs, often before you even notice
Ready to get started?
Connect with us to streamline your policy management and ensure effortless compliance.
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Uniting excellence in integration and features for seamless policy management
As the newly appointed IT Manager at our company, I was tasked with implementing the Xoralia policy management tool, and the experience has been nothing short of impressive.
Rian Stuart
IT Manager
TwinStream
