Regulatory Compliance: Cost or Opportunity Center?

This blog was last updated on October 18, 2023

As a business, complying with local laws, rules and mandates is not optional, but a requirement to operate. Achieving this takes resources: human, technical and financial. All things that everyone would rather allocate to attracting new customers and growing their business. At Sovos, we get it.

The situation

The world of regulatory compliance has grown extremely complex and continues to change rapidly. Meeting the required data reporting standards has moved beyond the capability of manual processes and necessitates technology-driven solutions.

However, that doesn’t mean you need to approach compliance simply as a cost center that siphons off valuable resources, providing no business benefit in return. Quite the contrary, when managed correctly, your approach to regulatory compliance can provide valuable insights into your business operations while maximizing the efficiency of resources.

Let’s examine the two primary approaches to meeting compliance obligations through technology.

Point products

• Localized solutions that solve one specific problem.
• Lack the ability to scale to meet changing and future mandates.
• Do not provide a singular view into your organization’s compliance posture.

In this scenario, businesses acquire new technology solutions to solve specific issues. Often times coupling multiple point solutions together as they expand into new regions or mandates evolve and demand new information.

While this represents a quick resolution to a singular problem, it lacks a long-term vision and creates significant challenges for IT due to the level of manual oversight required. We refer to this as the cost center approach as it takes an ever-increasing level of investment of money and resources but doesn’t provide any additional value to your organization.

Centralized solutions

• An automated suite of compliance solutions capable of addressing all regulatory compliance demands.
• Fully scalable and able to meet the growth needs of your business, both in size and region.
• Provides a centralized, manageable dashboard of your compliance obligations.

In this scenario, businesses centralize all their regulatory compliance management under one system. As it is fully automated and updated continuously to account for new and changing laws and mandates, no action is required on behalf of the business. This saves valuable resources while presenting one complete, dashboard view of your compliance posture.

We refer to this as the opportunity center approach as it enables you to make strategic decisions based on a complete view of your compliance obligations and statuses. The comprehensive dashboard view is also a valuable tool in identifying areas of inefficiency and noncompliance, allowing you to address anything before notices are issued by regulators.