Regulatory tracking software
- Submissions a year
- 36
- Hours a year on preparation and review
- 504
- What that time costs a year
- $31,248
Every figure on this site comes from the returns you owe and the method shown beside each figure: your forms, your frequencies, your hours, your rate. Where a page states a fact about a form or an obligation it names the document it came from, and those are the eCFR and regulator pages cited on the page. Nothing here is legal advice.
Regulatory tracking software is bought for a smaller reason than it is sold for. The pitch is usually a dashboard of obligations across the whole business; the reason anybody actually buys is that a return went late once and nobody wants to find out that way again. Those are different products, and the second one is a list with dates and a record of what went. This page is about what that list has to hold, why the event-driven obligations are the ones it exists for, and what a filing record needs before it is worth having. The periodic returns are the easy half: a quarterly form announces itself and a calendar reminder covers it. It is the obligation triggered by something happening, where the clock starts on an event nobody flagged as a reporting event, that a tracker earns its keep on.
Open the Regulatory reporting software for banks Free to use. No account, no card, no sign-up.
List the returns, then list the triggers
Two lists, not one. The periodic returns are the ones you already know. The triggered obligations are the ones where a contract signed on a Tuesday starts a clock, and they are the ones a calendar of quarters will never catch. Most firms find at least one they were not tracking at all.
Put the event-driven clocks in the same list as the quarters
The obligations that go late are the ones whose clock starts on an event rather than on a calendar. A suspicious activity report is due within thirty calendar days of the initial detection of facts that may constitute a basis for filing, sixty where no suspect was identified. A currency transaction report is due within fifteen calendar days of the transaction. An FDIC-supervised institution notifies the agency of a bank service relationship within thirty days of the contract or the performance of the service, whichever comes first. None of those has a quarter-end, all of them have a day on which somebody had to notice, and a tracker that holds only the periodic returns is silent on exactly the filings that carry the penalties.
Give every entry a regulator, a period and a due date rule
Not a date, a rule: end of the month following the quarter, or thirty days after the event, or whatever it actually is. A stored date goes stale after one cycle; a stored rule generates the next date forever and survives a change of person.
Name a preparer and an approver for each
One person prepares, a different person approves. Where the same name is in both boxes, write that down rather than hiding it, because it is the first thing an examiner asks about and it is better to have a stated reason than a discovered gap.
Record the filing, not just the intention
Date filed, version filed, receipt reference, who approved it. The tracker is only worth keeping if closing an item requires evidence that something went, otherwise it becomes a list of ticks that describes a plan rather than a history.
Close the period with a review of what did not happen
At each period end, before the calendar rolls forward, read the list of triggered obligations and ask of each whether the trigger occurred and nobody flagged it: was a new service contract signed, was a threshold crossed, did a material change happen that a filing has to follow. This is a ten-minute meeting and it is the only control that catches an obligation nobody knew had started. Record the answer, including the nil answers, because a note that says no trigger this quarter, reviewed by a named person, is what an examiner accepts in place of a filing that was never owed.
A return the Regulatory tracking software does not fit?
Tell us about the return the worksheet does not fit and we will say whether it can reach it. The two we get asked about most are an obligation whose clock starts on an event rather than a period, and a return prepared by a service provider where the firm still has to keep the record. Both are workable and neither is obvious from the worksheet alone, so describe what you actually owe rather than the form name, and say which system the figures come out of.
Disclosures: the questions that come up
Is a shared calendar enough?
For periodic returns, often. It cannot hold a due-date rule, a preparer, an approver or a receipt, which is everything the record is for after the fact.
How do we handle event-driven obligations?
Store the trigger and the interval rather than a date, and make somebody responsible for noticing the trigger. That second half is a process problem, not a software one.
What does an examiner actually ask for?
Usually what was filed, when, and who approved it, for a specific period. A tracker that cannot answer those three is a to-do list.
Does this prepare the return?
No, and it deliberately does not. It tracks what is owed and records what went; preparation stays where it is.
Which obligations start on an event rather than a date?
The ones with an interval in the rule: within thirty days of, within fifteen calendar days of, promptly after. Suspicious activity and currency transaction reports, a bank service company notice, a material change to a registration. List them with their trigger and their interval, and give the trigger an owner.
Disclovo Pro
Keep the calendar, and the receipt against every return
Keep every return in one calendar with its regulator, its period and its due date, and the record of who prepared it, who approved it and when it went.
- Download the worksheet as a file you can circulate and keep.
- The worksheet without our name on the footer.
- Keep this worksheet against the period it was run for.
- Your firm's name and logo on the worksheet instead of ours.
- Export every worksheet and every filing record at once, for an examination.
- Send a worksheet or a filing record from inside the workspace.
$24per month, whole team
Start Disclovo Pro Free for 14 days. No card needed. PricingThe first 14 days are free and no card is asked for. Add a card during the trial and the first charge is on the day it ends; do not, and your workspace becomes read-only with nothing deleted. Disclovo Pro is $24 a month. It renews automatically each month at $24 until you cancel, and the price and the renewal date are shown again before you pay.