Compliance Life Cycle: 2025 Guide to Annual Reports and Business Licenses
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Navigating the annual reports and business licenses required to operate your business is time consuming and complex. Maintaining compliance for your business is essential—CSC can help.
Our compliance experts will discuss key insights on managing annual reports and licenses, and talk through best practices for building a streamlined, centralized process to effectively manage compliance. We’ll also share how CSC’s compliance solutions can make this process easier.
Webinar transcript
Disclaimer: Please be advised that this recorded webinar has been edited from its original format, which may have included a product demo and other engagement features. To set up a live demo, please complete the form above on our website. If you currently are not on our website and are watching this on our YouTube channel, there's a link to the website in the description of this video. Thank you.
Caitlin: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Guide to Annual Reports and Business Licenses." My name is Caitlin Alaburda, and I will be your moderator. Joining us today are Andrea Jonaitis, Calla Heathman, and Arianne Turnier.
Andrea is a senior sales engineer in the Corporate and Legal Solutions Group at CSC. Since joining CSC in 2017, Andrea has specialized in global subsidiary management and entity management, working with prospects to present an accurate and clear scope of services, including helping subsidiaries stay in compliance as well as assisting with legalizations, notarizations, apostilles, liquidations, new entity formations, dissolutions, and demonstrating CSC Entity Management.
Callas is a senior sales engineer, specializing in CSC's Business License suite of services. With CSC for 10 years, Calla has focused on demonstrating the capabilities and proving the efficiencies of CSC's business licensing products across all business sectors.
Arianne is a product director for License Pro, CSC's license and permit management software. She is an advocate for supporting the needs of licensing professionals and recognizing the value they bring to their respective workplaces. Arianne has been at the forefront of license compliance technology for 18 years.
And with that, I'd like to welcome Andrea, Calla, and Arianne.
Andrea: Hi, everyone. Calla, I think you're talking on mute actually.
Calla: Again, it wouldn't be a live webinar without some technical difficulties, like our session this morning. Well, thank you all for joining us, and thanks, Andrea, for pointing out my mute button. We appreciate you taking some time to spend the afternoon with us to learn more about CSC's solutions when it comes to annual reports and business licenses.
To start off with our agenda today, we're going to really just start with talking a little bit about annual reports versus business licenses, what they are, when you file them, why you need them, some impacts, and also just defining a little bit about what those terms mean to CSC. Then we'll move into some common challenges that we experience when working with clients just like yourself, things that you're experiencing in your compliance space when it comes to filing, tracking, all of that good stuff. Then, of course, we have to cover some consequences of non-compliance, things that you can experience if you are falling out of compliance. And lastly, we will spend a large part of the time talking about how CSC can help you, what do we have in our wheelhouse that can help propel your compliance processes and make your life a little bit easier when thinking about these kinds of filings throughout the year.
Lastly, like Caitlin had mentioned, we're going to round out with a Q&A. So as you have questions throughout the session, feel free to leave them in our chat box. We might be able to get to them during the presentation. But anything that we can't answer then, we'll try to answer at the Q&A spot.
And with that, we're going to move directly into just annual reports versus licenses, business licenses, really what does it mean to CSC, what does it mean to you, when do you file, all of that. So I invite, Andrea, I think we'll pass it to you to start with the annual reports.
Andrea: Okay. Great, Calla. Thank you so much. So when we are talking about annual reports, most often we are talking about filings that are required for U.S. subsidiaries, and they are due at the secretary of state level to remain in so-called good standing or compliance with your entities.
Often these reports are due annually, although the deadline can vary depending on really a variety of factors. Due dates could be a fixed date that the jurisdiction sets, or they could be dependent upon other factors, such as entity anniversary date or fiscal year end.
You may also know these reports by other names. So sometimes they are state-specific names. They might be something like the statement of information in California. Some names are shared across a few states or jurisdictions, such as the franchise tax report. Sometimes there are generalized names that are used, like the occupational tax report or the annual list.
Regardless of whatever you might identify this report or the nomenclature you use for identifying this report, the key takeaway here is that these reports are required in order to maintain the ongoing good standing compliance of your entities. And proof of an entity's good standing is often required when filing with different agencies or for different entity transactions. So staying on top of these annual report requirements is incredibly important.
Arianne is going to share an overview of business licenses and permits and how they're different from annual reports.
Arianne: Right. So when we talk about licensing, I like to call it the Wild Wild West. Every jurisdiction has their own sheriff in town so to speak. Licensing is regulated at all different levels. So we have federal licensing. We have state licensing, county, and city. But you also have licensing for things like tribal lands, parishes, school districts, fire departments. So licensing can be regulated by a lot of different jurisdictions.
It's required in order to do business. Now there's really I would say three buckets that you want to look at for licensing. There is do you need to do business in this jurisdiction. Sometimes the license is just a general privilege to do business, and those can be regulated based on the fact that you have a brick and mortar, the fact that you're generating revenue, the fact that you have employee withholdings. So a number of different things are looked at by jurisdictions to determine if you are doing business in their agency.
You also may need a license to sell a specific product, so selling tobacco, selling towels, selling bait, liquor. So certain products will trigger a licensing requirement, and also certain services. So construction services, staffing services, these are all examples of services that are also regulated by jurisdictions.
Now in terms of when to file, licensing is a little bit all over the place. You'll see in many cases licensing is regulated based on an anniversary date. So the date that you applied for a license is the date that you will be renewing your license. In some cases, those are annual, quarterly, semiannual. They could be 5-year, 10-year licenses. But in either case, you're going to need to file a license based on some kind of schedule.
Now in other cases, you're going to see jurisdictions require that license based on their own schedule. So many jurisdictions issue licenses seasonally. So for example, I might have a license that is due December 31st or expires December 31st. It might not be due until January or February, or it might be due prior to the expiration date.
So in many cases, that when to file varies a lot. Sometimes your obligation to file is before the license expires. Sometimes your obligation to file is after the license expires.
Now how it impacts you is that failure to have a license can impact your ability to operate. So in many cases, you need the license before you open. You need the license before you start offering services, and you may need licenses as your services and activities change or as your footprint changes. So oftentimes what we see is that we might have a business that does a lot of service work but not a lot of brick and mortar. So as an example, you might need licensing as you continue to service customers in different jurisdictions, even if you don't have a physical location.
So let's take a look at our next slide and look at some of those common challenges. So with licensing, there's a lot of different challenges. We're going to kind of take a look at a few of them.
So I'm going to start with seasonality, which I mentioned a little bit. So with seasonality, it really depends on the kind of filing we're talking about. When we're talking about business licensing, again, you may find certain industries have a high increase in licensing during certain times of the year. So we see an increase in pharmacy licenses mid-year, for example. A lot of the local filings are required around December 31st, and again might be due before or after that year end. And if you as a business tend to do a lot of openings or you have new growth during certain times of the year, you may find that you are seasonally heavy because of the anniversary date of your openings.
When it comes to annual reports, a lot of times the deadlines with which your filings are due have to do with your formation type. So again, it can vary by industry type. It can vary by the jurisdictions you're filing with, and it can also vary by the way the jurisdiction itself regulates the different businesses that you guys do when you started your business.
In terms of complexity, complexity is a big part of this work, right, because it's going to depend heavily on how you operate. So there is no one-size-fits-all for licensing. There's no one-size-fits-all for annual reports. In the case of both, it's going to depend on the kind of business you operate, your formation type. It's going to depend on how the jurisdiction regulates, what those requirements are. So complexity can change.
Now what we're seeing is that complexity continues to grow year-over-year. So we're not seeing this is getting easier. We're seeing that this is getting more difficult. Jurisdictions are regulating more products, more services. They're putting more expectations on businesses to report. So that complexity only has continued to grow across our annual reports and our business licenses for most businesses.
Calla, I'll turn it over to you for the other two.
Calla: Yeah. And down here, on the bottom left, we're thinking about data. Data really just directly ties into a lot of things here, especially complexity. When we're thinking about managing these kinds of filings, you need corporate data. You need to understand filing deadlines to the license you even have, license numbers, where to go to file these things. And then is there other items that you need, like a supporting document, a bond, an insurance, certificate, something like that, that you need to attach to your applications to make sure that you have those approvals?
So managing data is really there's getting more and more issues or challenges with managing data and making sure that you have everything that you need to support all these kinds of filings. And even so, a lot of the data that you need for an annual report is also translated to a license, and we oftentimes see a lot of different teams managing these kinds of filings. So if you don't know what was last listed on your annual report as your officers and directors, your annual list, that may impact some of your business license filings. So keeping up with that data, the changes and things that are necessary to report upon for yourself internally is really increasingly difficult. And to add to complexity for area, jurisdictions are requiring more and more things every year.
Another challenge that we're running into is just the expertise in the industry with licenses or with annual reports or corporate transactions. We've seen a lot, a big shift in the workplace with people retiring or leaving the companies and moving on. So having that institutional knowledge or someone not leaving records behind is really creating this need for knowledge to be relearned or finding a different way to start managing all of this. And that's a big, big challenge that we're seeing is just losing the knowledge of what licenses we have, what filings we have, where are we registered, what do we need to do, and ultimately where is all of this data that we can use to create a good process for ourselves.
With all these challenges, really just comes what happens if you are experiencing these and we're not able to keep up with the filings or things go wrong. You have all of your consequences of not being in compliance. And Andrea, I think you'll walk us through the annual report side?
Andrea: Sure. Thanks, Calla. So I mentioned previously that proof of an entity's good standing is often required when you're conducting your day-to-day business operations. Missing annual reports can cause a loss of good standing, and it just has a tremendous impact on your business. It can include things like the loss of a name, entity revocation. It can hinder your ability to open a bank account or to conduct business. There can be just a slew of penalties and fees and interest.
We had a customer, a prospective customer at the time that we converted to a customer, they came to us because they actually were in the process of working on a deal with a client of their own. The client doing their own due diligence researched the prospective customer that was coming to us, and they found out that their entity was not in good standing. They had missed some of these requirements that is public knowledge, you can see that. And so our perspective customer lost their client because of their loss of good standing or the fact that their entity was out of compliance. The worst part is that they didn't even know that they were revoked or that the entity wasn't in good standing because they had contracted with a different provider to have that type of service in place and to ensure that that didn't happen.
So there are a lot of consequences and pitfalls. It could be tremendously dangerous and a surprise when, like that customer, you're losing deals because you have failed to meet those compliance requirements. So let me share over to Arianne so she can share some additional details about business licenses.
Arianne: Right. So and we have similar challenges on the business licensing side. So one example that I remember from conversations over the years is a convenience store that did not get their health permit renewed for the county, and this impacted multiple locations. So it wasn't just the one location. But because they had a problem with one, it rolled out to the other ones. And this affected their ability to sell the hot dogs, the cheeseburgers, the pretzels, whatever it might be at those locations. But it wound up costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue because it was really a three-month process to get that license reinstated.
So these are problems where we can't sell a certain product or service because our license isn't in good standing. Also, we see that with liquor licenses. For example, if you don't have a liquor license in place, you might be a restaurant who can't sell liquor for a period of time. And those are all really detrimental to our profit.
Now other cases might be things like inability to bid on opportunities. I use the example of a contractor license. If you're trying to get a bid on a project and you don't have all the appropriate building and contractor licenses, you might not be able to get that bid, and someone who is up to date, is in good standing is going to get that project.
So these are all examples of cases where having that license, being ready for any kind of audit is necessary. It could also cause negative press. I'm sure you've been to a location where they have had a less than positive health letter on the front of their building. That sits right on the front of your building, and sometimes it makes it into news articles and press. So with social media the way it is, we want to make sure that we can always have that "A" rating for any kind of license we might be holding.
Penalties and fines are a reality as well. Business closures and even arrests are all very realistic in the licensing space when we are not compliant. So certainly consequences to be aware of, making sure that the best practice for licensing is file and research and get compliant because we don't want to have a situation where a jurisdiction does the research and finds out we are not because those back fines can be substantial because some of them are percentages of your revenue per day. So they can be very, very high if you are found to be non-compliant.
Calla: Wonderful. Why are we here? We're here to provide some help to you, help you understand how CSC can be here as your partner to bring you through all these compliance cycles and get you up to speed with the transparency or staying on top of your filings. So we're going to shift gears into just what can we do for you, and that really starts with why. Why should you partner with us? What is CSC doing for you that makes us a good partner in these spaces? Andrea, I think you have some good points leading up to security, so I'll pass it to you for the first two.
Andrea: I do. Yeah, thanks, Calla. So not only what are we doing, but what can we be doing for you. So kicking us off is industry-leading security. This is an area that really sets CSC aside in the industry. The way that we approach security, availability, privacy, and data protection, we have among the most stringent and highest levels of security and protections in place. We work regularly with customers who have the strictest of security requirements, such as banks and other financial institutions. And we really take a multi-prong approach to security.
So first is security against bad actors that want to harm your business, making sure that you keep any of those outside intrusions out, security as it relates to the people that you choose to permission into your technologies, and then security as it relates to the CSC team and the way that we provide service and support to your organization. We have strict security mechanisms for all of our full-service and self-service technology solutions.
All CSC employees and data are maintained on CSC dedicated servers. Not all employees, all applications are maintained on CSC dedicated servers, and they're located in the United States. All employees are also, at least those that are handling like service of process and other details are located in the U.S. But we do have a global presence.
Our servers are ISO 27001 certified and SOC 2 Type 2 certified annually. Our applications, our organization, our employees are tested and maintain the SOC certification on an annual basis. In addition to that SOC certification, we conduct regular penetration tests, which we sometimes call ethical hacking. That allows us to evaluate our security mechanisms, the firewalls, the encryptions, and other protections that we have in place, again to make sure that you are protected and that we are protected against those hacking attempts and the bad actors.
The second prong of our approach was protection against the people you choose to permission into your technologies. All of our applications include robust and flexible user access levels, with role-based permissions and folder level security. And with an entire team of security specialists that are dedicated to our security and availability mechanisms, we're prepared to speak in depth with you about all of the protections that we have in place there.
And then, as it relates to the way that CSC protects you, when you're engaging with any provider and services, it's really crucial to understand who it is that you're working with. So we do not use any virtual offices. We don't outsource any services. We take the utmost care when dealing with your business, and we really treat it as if it were our own. We maintain a strong team of highly trained CSC employees. We're able to provide high-quality service across many disciplines and business areas using our own internal teammates. So we want to, again, kind of treat you with care and security.
We also have a lot of policies and procedures around acceptable use or access of any information or documents that we might have available to us as we work in support roles for you. So we want to make sure, again, that you feel 100% confident and comfortable with those protections that we have in place.
Whether you need a full-service solution or are simply looking for an industry-leading technology that you can use on your own, we also can tie into this next one, which is to decrease your administrative burden. As your partner, when we provide services, we automatically will flow data and documents into our CSCNavigator platform with the annual reports and business license outsourcing services. You can view and access data and documents that we maintain in that database. You can access them 24/7 at your convenience. They're available perpetually inside of the platform.
We also will automatically calendar deadlines for these critical compliance obligations, so that you can see a list of all deadlines that are required, when they're due. We will even automate the status and upkeep of those events as we complete your filings or provide you with the services.
The various technologies that are included both with the full-service solution as well as the self-service models that we offer give you the ability to manage data and documents on your own in an incredibly easy, user-friendly, kind of straightforward fashion, again helping you to decrease the administrative burden and take the complication out of how to manage those administrative requirements. We take pride in our technologies being incredibly intuitive and easy to use. We provide free and unlimited training, so that we can ensure that they're easy to use. And we provide you with all of the most critical functionalities that you need so that, again, you can kind of streamline that process, simplify the storage, the management, the reporting of data and documents that you need for annual reporting and business licensing purposes, again, whether we are providing that service for you, or whether you are choosing to manage and maintain those items and handle those on your own.
So let's transition to Calla now for information on how we can help to increase transparency and reduce complexity in your portfolio as well.
Calla: Yeah, I think that you covered it with some of our technology points, right? The idea behind a lot of our technology and why we provide it to you or that you can leverage it to curate your own kind of processes is to increase the transparency that you have, not only into what you're filing, when you're filing it, but just additional data points that you may need to be able to complete that process. So having that centralized repository for annual report data or license data and then all of those things that go into those filings with officer and director management or knowing who your qualifiers, things like that throughout the systems are really what our technology can provide to you for that increased transparency.
If we're doing work for you we also provide status updates so you can see in a full transparent view where we are in the process, what we're expecting of you, or when things are completed and done. So it's a really good overview so you just have access to everything and you can see that. With that being said, because we can decrease all of your administrative burdens or save you time on things and give you those places where you can see everything coming to fruition, it just helps reduce the complexity across the board, right? We're no longer struggling with when things are coming due or where deadlines are, or maybe even again tracking those items that are going on the filings. And it's just giving you a better place to see all of that.
With some of our services, which I'll talk about in just a couple of minutes, like research options, it's also helping reduce that complexity with some of those questions that are in the chat here about when are licenses required and different things like that. Partnering with us for another service that we offer, which is not in this presentation, but registered agent services can help with those annual reports and reduce complexity as to when they're coming due, a lot of different things like that.
So all of these areas are where we can help you in terms of the partnership, and we're going to transition into just what those services can do for you on the annual report side and the licensing side. I think we're going to start with more of our full-service solutions. So we've been talking about these two different areas within CSC, one where we can become an extension of your team here at CSC and do the work on your behalf and start to take on those administrative tasks, prep forms, submit things for you, archive information. And then a little bit later, Arianne is going to speak to how we can help from a self-service perspective, where we give you the tools to make those processes happen for you more efficiently by maintaining that control over the process.
But starting with the full-service solutions, we have annual report preparation and filing. We have license outsourcing, and we also have tailored research that we can prepare on the licensing perspective as well. But starting with that, Andrea, I think if you want to kick us off with the annual report service.
Andrea: Sure, absolutely. I saw a question in the chat come in. Thank you. Please continue sending these questions in chat. I saw a question come in from Victor that was asking if we can handle Canadian filings or filings in Canada.
CSC provides annual report preparation and filing services in all 50 states. We provide filing in the District of Columbia. We can file in the U.S. territories. We can file in Canadian provinces. So this includes the filing for each entity's domestic jurisdiction as well as all jurisdictions where an entity might be qualified to do business. Our team of specialists has more than 135 years of combined experience in providing annual report filings, and we manage approximately 400,000 annual report filings each and every year, a tremendous volume, and we are experts at taking care of that.
When we provide that service, we start with an initial audit of the status of all entities in each jurisdiction. Based on the audit, we provide reports outlining all upcoming filings 45 days in advance. We also investigate the good standing status of each entity and any of the filings that are kind of due within that time frame.
When we move on to the preparation of annual report forms, filing the required documents and advancing jurisdiction fees in most jurisdictions, we automate the flow of the reports and the filing evidence into our technology portal, CSCNavigator, where your team can, again, access those documents. We also will upload the filing evidence that's received from the state that those filings were accepted. So that way you can have access to those documents and reports in perpetuity.
We also manage your deadlines. I mentioned we're going to automate the deadlines, the filing status. We're going to keep up to date any other filing details that you might need, and that's going to be visible to you on the compliance calendar in real time so that you can check the status of those filings. And as I mentioned before, you also can see the entity status with the secretary of state in the CSCNavigator platform, so that we can provide a full transparency to your entity compliance here.
And what I have next for you is a screenshot of the tracker grid, the compliance calendar that we use for your compliance purposes. This calendar is automatically created for you within the CSCNavigator platform as a registered agent customer. You do not need to build this list of deadlines. It is automatically going to show you any secretary of state deadline, like annual reports, income tax or franchise tax. And this is assembled automatically based on the entities that are in the system and the jurisdictions in the technology where you're listed as formed or doing business. We audit our Knowledge Base daily. This is connected to CSC's backend Knowledge Base so that it informs when these due dates are based on, again, the entity type and the jurisdiction, so that we can ensure that the deadlines that are automatically calendared for you on the compliance calendar are accurate and up to date.
If we are maintaining your annual report filings for you, we will go on to maintain the filing status. You can see the Filing Responsibility column is earmarked as a CSC managed obligation. You'll be able to have visibility into the due dates. Off to the side of the screenshot, there's a little bit more information in terms of status, stage of completion, the date that the filing was completed. We have a comprehensive tracker grid, which is going to allow you to have that full transparency into the status of those obligations. We'll also, again, upload the copies of the evidence into the filing cabinet under the correct entity.
If you are handling annual reports on your own, you can manage the details of this tracker grid yourself in terms of the status, the responsible party, other information that you would like to track or have transparency into for your filings so that we can provide a tool for anybody based on what level of service you would prefer from CSC.
Now I'll turn it over to Calla to get into CSC's outsourced business licensing solution.
Calla: Thanks, Andrea. So first, we'll cover our first pillar of license services, if you will. It's going to be our research offering. So we do offer a full suite of comprehensive license services or research services, if you will, that just help you understand what kinds of requirements may be out there during different phases of your business. So you'll see a few of those here.
We can talk about those in further depth. I did see some questions. How do you figure these out? Can CSC help with uncovering license requirements? And the answer is yes, we do have a couple of different ways that we can do that. So if you are a business just starting operation, you've never done anything in this place before, or you're adding a new line of business, maybe you open a new brick-and-mortar shop, or you start to sell into a new jurisdiction, we can help you uncover what license requirements you may have for the first time by our service that we consider new location research.
Basically what happens is you define your location or your service area, or where you're going to be doing the work. You provide CSC with an understanding of what your business activities are so we can help understand with those jurisdictions what kinds of licenses that they would apply to a business like yours. And then once we've done that research on the different levels of governmental authorities that apply to the location that you gave to us, we'll give you that report that says these are the license obligations at the city, the county, the state level based on the information you shared with us about your specific business activities when you're moving into those new markets.
That helps you really just start off fresh and not have to go back and maybe audit that kind of information later. You know that you're moving into these jurisdictions with the right requirements based on what your actual activities are going to be in that space.
Now on the opposite side of that, a lot of you may be working with an existing location portfolio or an existing portfolio of licenses. Maybe some of you have inherited that from someone else that maybe left, maybe left you no records, whatever that may be. We do also have the ability to audit an existing portfolio of licenses or locations to help identify not only what obligations you may have from a licensing perspective, but out of those obligations what do you have. And CSC can help uncover different license numbers, expiration dates, statuses of those licenses as they exist today or maybe did in the past, and remedial actions that need to take place to remain in compliance.
We can also uncover gaps. So if there's any potential gaps in your coverage, maybe there's an obligation that you should have, but you have not yet filed for it, we can provide you access to how to get that license.
Also, which certainly doesn't happen as much as we'd hope, it's changed a lot over the years, but is there any possibility that you are over-licensed? Do you have a license in a particular jurisdiction that you don't need? We see this typically in an area where maybe you have a brick-an -mortar location that's residing outside of city limits and you got a city license that doesn't necessarily apply to you. Is there something that our report can help you divest of?
So it's a really comprehensive overview of any existing operations to help you understand if there's gaps, not only gaps in license obligations, but gaps in your data, did something get missed, or anything that you're over-licensed for.
We do also see, I think there might have been a question about this a little earlier on, does CSC help with amendments or other types of filings that are not necessarily just a new application or a renewal. We do. We also have some research services to help you understand what kinds of filings or what paperwork needs to be submitted to different jurisdictions based on the change that you have, whether it's a name change, whether it's an FEIN change, whether it's an entire conversion. Whatever it may be, our service for amendment research can just help you identify what those jurisdictions are going to require of you to submit in order to reflect those changes. Sometimes it might be a simple email. Sometimes it might be a phone call. Sometimes it might be a brand-new application.
So we have all these different options just to shed some light on what the requirements are, the paperwork, and ultimately how you need to move forward in any number of those scenarios that you might be experiencing.
So we talked a little bit about the research and giving you access to this information about licenses. Well, we can also help you file them. So at CSC, we are a full-service outsourcing provider, and that really just means that we can become an extension of your team when it comes to managing your license portfolio. We provide you with dedicated support, a dedicated business license specialist that's going to proactively help manage your licenses, and the expiration dates so we can start proactively managing these filings for you as they're coming due without you having to track spreadsheets or get jurisdictional reminders, which we know are few and far between these days.
So really what the service entails is providing a centralized platform to view all of the licenses that you have. You either send that information to us, or we help you gather that. I think there might be a question we'll touch base on in the Q&A as well about how do we streamline gathering information. We'll talk about that. But we take all of the details about your licenses and we put it in our software, our business license portfolio management system, so at any time you can log in and see what licenses you have and all of the data points related to those licenses, which is backed by our security standards that Andrea had shared with us earlier in that technology space.
That's when the renewal management really starts, right? We proactively track those expiration dates. We then take care of all the administrative tasks that are a little bit more menial for you, like obtaining applications, even understanding if there's been changes with those applications. Is there now an online filing option where there wasn't before? Do we do logins, all of that good stuff.
Ultimately, we prep the forms for you. So a lot of that standard entity information that we need to report on those licenses can be reused and put on those forms for you so we can identify what else is there. Are there other supporting items that we need to complete these filings, like gross receipts, or employee accounts, or bonds, or something that we don't have yet so we can then effectively submit those licenses and get the approvals?
One major thing that we also do for you is advance the fees. So instead of having to deal with the headache of having all these jurisdictions require different types of fee advancement, checks, whatever it is, CSC will just submit the fees on your behalf at time of filing, and then you get invoiced at a later date without having to add an escrow fund or any additional fees there.
So not only can we help with uncovering requirements for you, but we do have the ability to help manage the process on your behalf, which is all housed in our technology. So I'll share a little screenshot with you here about what the technology looks like. It's a pretty simplistic overview. It's really just designed to give you everything at your fingertips and a really, really quick and easy way.
You'll notice some items there, like the license copy on the left, giving you access to the data, well, the actual physical copy if you need to produce that and send it out or anything like that. The key pieces of data we track, license numbers, expiration dates, entities. I think there was a question about subsidiaries. And if you have multiple entities, you'll be able to track that by the license holder. That way you can very clearly see who we're filing for and what.
You'll also take notice there is an order status history. This is our way to give you transparency into the process and share the stages with you, the steps that we're in. What are we doing where in process? Is it new? Are we getting applications? Are we prepping them? Is your license submitted or not? Is there something that we need from you? And we do leverage the platform to send out requests if there's anything else that we need.
So again, a lot of time spent on the full-service side, but just know that we've got you. We can do the work for you. But I think a really cool thing about CSC is that we can also help you leverage your internal teams to do this stuff a little bit more efficiently on your own. And Arianne is going to walk us through that next phase, which we consider our self-management license software, License Pro.
Arianne: Perfect. So obviously, every client is a little bit different, so what they need varies, especially in the licensing space. In addition to providing services where we complete the licensing activities for you, we also provide software for clients who will be continuing to self-manage it. This is especially helpful for some of our larger clients who have a large team and a lot of expertise.
So our product is called License Pro, and this software is really designed for in-house licensing teams to have a centralized repository for all of their data, their documents, their calendaring, their workflows, so that they have that full transparency, they can assign tasks and responsibilities to people. So I'm going to walk you through some of the kind of key features that we provide within the software, things that really make a big difference, especially if you're using things like spreadsheets, Smartsheets, something homegrown, really looking at how these features give you a leg up on your current compliance process.
So I'll start first with renewal management. So you'll see here renewal workflow designer. The software is set up for each client to design their custom workflows. What that means is that if you're dealing with different kinds of licenses, licenses that might be things like contractor licenses versus business versus liquor, each of these kinds of licenses have different requirements. We've talked about complexity before. So when you set up your workflows, you can have some of your team members doing renewals that include requirements like getting affidavits or getting notaries or getting documentation from licensed employees. And you may have other workflows where you get the bill, you pay the bill, and you send it off.
So those workflow designers allow you to set it up so that each of your licenses have the relevant steps set up for the tasks on your team. We can have better visibility into what everybody is doing, making sure that there's accountability and that we don't miss anything.
Now we also provide alerts and notifications about the work that is being done in the software. So those notifications can come in a number of different forms. We have mentions within the software, so you can mention other users to take a look at things. We have notifications that are built out with our custom reports, setting schedules and criteria. And then, in addition to that, we also have the ability to send emails out of the software to notify people so that we can collaborate with the field.
Now in addition to renewal management, we also have custom workflows, and the custom workflows are really kind of a unique feature of the software. We want to make sure that this is not just a renewal tracker, but this is really a tool where you manage all of the compliance obligations around your licensing.
So custom workflows plays a big part in that. It means that we can create workflows for things like onboarding a new employee. We can create workflows for setting up a new location. We can create workflows for setting up a new location in one state versus another. Those custom workflows are going to enable you, again, to create standard business processes with expected steps that your team members can be assigned to do. And it means we can also assign different steps to different people. So if multiple teams collaborate on a new location, we can have different workflows to assign the responsibilities across them.
All of this really helps us to improve automation. It means that we know exactly who's doing what. We can create reports to have better understanding. But also a huge part of our automation has to do with document management and payment processing. So if we look at things like payment processing, the system has a full payment processing workflow, generating the payments, tracking the check requests, creating check requests, approving, interfacing with accounting, or if we're paying by credit card, tracking those expenses and generating automated reports that can be provided to your accounting team to save time on all of that administrative work. The goal of the automation is to reduce the day-to-day activities so that you're doing less busywork and actually getting the compliance work done.
Now our software also lends itself to more visibility. So we've got those dashboards and KPIs to make sure everybody is seeing what they need to see. And dashboards can be management specific, and they can also be user specific. That means, as a leader, I might have a calendar of information I'm looking at for my team and how many team members have filings due in the next week or two weeks, hopefully nothing past due. But more importantly, as a user, I can set my own view. So I can look at just the work that I have, filter out anybody who is not me. Or if I need to take on work for a short period of time for a colleague, I can. So those KPIs and those dashboards will make sure that everybody's up to date. We're getting the right level of visibility across the organization, both in the corporate office and even out to the field if needed.
We also provide integrations, and this is an important part, especially for some of our larger clients. Think about things like needing to import gross receipts to calculate licensing fees, or importing current personnel for each location, or making sure that we have HR updates for our licensed employees. So being able to integrate with other internal systems will help to ensure that when changes occur across the organization, we can respond appropriately on the licensing side.
Now these are just some of the big features that the software offers. Obviously, there's quite a bit more. We do recommend scheduling a demo for things like that. But I am going to show you a little bit of a peek at the actual main grids of the system. I apologize. This is actually labeled wrong. It should be the License Pro Main Grid.
What we're looking at right here is actually the main grid of License HQ, and we do have a dashboard as well. You'll see on the top here I have the homepage, the licenses, the sites, entities. I have quite a bit of information available to me. All of these different tabs you're seeing means that I can work across different sets of data at once. So if I'm working on a handful of licenses, but I need to look at some of the details about those entities, I can drill into additional data easily, either by jumping into a single record or looking at these other grids of data.
License Pro supports more than just renewals, as I mentioned. So we're going to track data about your locations, about your personnel if those are who are licensed, about your entities to make sure that everything is registering correctly. Now in addition to that, we also have inspection management, equipment, and licensing for things like X-ray machines, tractors and trailers.
And we also have contract administration and a library of forms. Now the library of forms is another research tool. So we know research and compliance, knowing what you need to file is important for everybody. If you're doing our full-service options, we do the research for you. But if you are using our self-service options or you can combine them, you have the ability to use our forms in here. And this means this is a self-service research library across the U.S.
So lots to offer here, including the reporting you're seeing, the import configurations I mentioned, and integration options. All of our data is editable in the system. We have action items to launch things and, of course, extensive reporting for our clients, and all the data security that Andrea mentioned earlier.
Now I'm going to go ahead and hand it back over to our team to go over About Us.
Calla: Yeah. Honestly, at the end of the day, we just want to thank you for joining us to learn more about our annual report and licensing services here at CSC. We have all these different options.
And just here on our About Us slide, the service and the expertise and the knowledge that we have to support you doesn't stop at just annual reports and business licenses. If you take a look at the screen here, you'll note that we have a presence globally. I think Andrea had mentioned that earlier, especially in the Canadian aspect.
We do a lot of different things. We have a lot of different service offerings that are really combined under why we are the business behind business. So if you take a look at some of the items that are going to be available after the presentation, that Caitlin had mentioned earlier, we'll have a solution slide there. You'll note that there is a lot more there than just licenses and annual reports. We have a lot of different things that we can assist with. If you see anything of interest, please let us know and we're happy to walk you through that. But we definitely can assist in really any avenue of your business life cycle when we're thinking about compliance as the world's leading provider of business administration and compliance solutions here at CSC.