Show of hands: who loves ongoing state money transmitter license (MTL) compliance? What’s your favorite part? Is it the impossibly meticulous recordkeeping requirements? How about the countless deadlines and various different reports you have to adhere to for each state throughout the year?
Not that? Maybe it’s the myriad of state regulations and compliance processes that can – and do – differ wildly from each other. The ones that seemingly change at a whim with little to no warning? They’re awesome.
We all know that state regulatory MTL compliance is a time-consuming chore, and this is especially true in the emerging cryptocurrency industry. Anyone in this space knows how difficult it can be to keep track of various states’ reporting requirements, records, and deadlines.
Fortunately, there are some tools that can make this process easier. Here’s a breakdown of the most prevalent – and best – record-keeping tools on the market.
Google Spreadsheets
The Google family of products is the go-to for many cryptocurrency businesses. Its wide array of tools, real-time accessibility, and free or lower cost price point are among the biggest draws, especially for growing crypto companies.
Google Sheets is one of the most commonly used tools for logging data for recordkeeping and reporting purposes. With this tool, making lists of individual state compliance items, linking to the related documents, delineating task owners, and marking the status of tasks is super easy, barely an inconvenience, especially if you love spending hours inputting data from multiple state regulations into tiny cells.
Google Sheets are also highly shareable, allowing anyone who has the link free reign to edit, move, delete and disseminate the document as they wish, eliminating those pesky meetings and remote collaboration hurdles.
Want a bit more control? Just go through the multi-step process to restrict access but don’t forget to do that every time you want to share a Sheet.
By the way, do you have great formula-building skills? Google Sheets is designed to ensure that you’re going to use them. That’s because getting the most out of the application means applying a bevy of formulas and macros to tailor the program and meet your company’s needs.
Don’t have the best spreadsheet skills? Don’t worry! You only have to spend countless hours finding and learning the most helpful formulas, functions and macros, which often happen to be most complicated. Helping you build new skills – yet another plus for Google tools!
Google Calendar
Another staple in the Google suite of apps, Google Calendar, is a popular time-management solution. It helps keep track of compliance-related dates as well as tasks and reminders to keep things in order.
As with Google Sheets, manually inputting all of the dates and reminders is a great time sink if you have nothing better to do, like run a business. And if you forget to input a deadline and the date passes? Well, there’s always next year!
It’s also easy for anyone using a shared calendar to change important dates. And since the ability to receive notifications about such changes is up to individual calendar settings, using Google Calendar becomes a fun guessing game of trying to determine if entries are correct and who knows what. This brings coworkers together since they then have to email each other constantly to see who made the changes, who knows about the changes, and, ultimately, who is responsible for what tasks. Don’t we all love a collaborative environment?
Why Google apps fall short
State MTL compliance is like being in a never-ending battle with several dozen different armies. Each state has its own regulations and processes that, if not followed precisely, can lead to a myriad of woes including fines, internal resource strains, business stoppages, and, ultimately, potential loss of licensure.
Looking at the many “benefits” of Google tools, it’s no surprise that they fall short when it comes to money service business license management and compliance.
The first issue is that there is very limited control of documents, calendar entries, and records. While access can be restricted to an extent, users that have edit-level controls can do whatever they want. This puts the accuracy of the data in jeopardy and can make the information unreliable. It also makes it difficult to find documents or deadlines if users can move or rename things at will, or, more likely, by fat-finger accident.
In addition, simple keeping of records and time management is possible with Google tools but large volumes of data quickly become inefficient to input, organize, and search. These Google tools also lack automated routing of calendar items, tasks, and spreadsheet data so each step of license management must be done manually. At the same time, it’s also impossible to achieve real-time synchronization of tasks, records and deadlines between users, making it extremely difficult to keep everyone on the same page about outstanding compliance activities. Not to mention that, due to the very nature of spreadsheets, all of the information they contain is effectively past tense.
Finally, Google offers almost no live support for most users, who have to rely instead on its Help Center and extremely limited phone support. And, they certainly don’t offer any real-time expert state MTL compliance support.
The ComplyFit solution
Friction is the bane of any compliance officer. Friction between recordkeeping, calendars, and software tools make it difficult to maintain strong internal control and oversight of reports, records, documents, and deadlines. It slows down the entire compliance process (and department for that matter), and makes it difficult to rely on and share information between stakeholders, staff, and state examiners.
ComplyFit aims to eliminate friction and replace it with a seamless, pain-free MTL management process. Our solution is a groundbreaking tool that helps state money transmitter licensees stay on top of their required license reporting obligations across all 50 states and territories.
ComplyFit is a first-of-its-kind solution allowing you to create calendar items and set reminders so you don’t have to constantly think about what needs to be done next. You can easily update the calendar when you complete certain tasks. You’ll receive proactive alerts about upcoming tasks letting you know in advance of deadlines with details and links to resources, forms, and regulatory contact information so that you may take immediate action. Your schedule becomes an automated, streamlined machine and your calendar becomes a useful tool for getting stuff done rather than a place to mark dates and promptly forget about them.
You can correct the issues that eat into your company’s productivity and reinvest valuable time into critical business development and compliance responsibilities.
We also offer live expert compliance support to help with setup, daily usage, and even the occasional troubleshooting.
Ready to leave outdated spreadsheets and unreliable calendars behind? Get in touch with us to take ComplyFit’s MTL management solution for a spin.
