Mastering Compliance: 2025 Guide to Annual Reports and Business Licenses

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Annie: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Mastering Compliance: 2025 Guide to Annual Reports and Business Licenses." My name is Annie Triboletti. I will be kicking things off as your moderator today.

So joining us today are Trent Bavaro, Calla Heathman, and Arianne Turnier. Trent is a product director for our Annual Reports Division, Calla is a senior sales engineer focusing on business license outsourcing, and Arianne is a product director specializing in business license and License Pro. So with that, I'd like to welcome in Trent, Calla, and Arianne.

Calla: Wonderful. Thanks, Annie. Before we get started for today's session, we just want to take the time to thank you for joining us and go over a quick agenda of what we'll be focusing on throughout the session.

We'll start with a quick overview of just annual reports and business licenses, how CSC defines them, when you need them, when you may file them, possibly what to expect when they're due, all of those things, and just really, again, define how CSC is classifying these items because those terms could mean different things to you and your organization. Then we'll kind of shift gears a little bit to understand or talk through some common compliance challenges that we see as we work with clients like you day in and day out, what things might you be experiencing. And then we'll transition into how that can impact the business and any consequences of non-compliance and things maybe, again, that you could be experiencing or that we've realized working in these industries with this type of compliance day in and day out. And ultimately, where we'll spend a lot of our time today is just helping you understand how we can be here to help at CSC and how we can become a partner of yours to streamline some of these compliance processes and maybe clear up some of those challenges that you might be experiencing with annual reports and business licenses.

And at the end of the session, we'll save some time for a Q&A, where you can ask us anything that you'd like about the presentation or the services that we have to offer. And we do encourage you throughout the session to just use the question function. If there are things that we can answer throughout the presentation, we will. And otherwise, we'll save some of those items at the end.

But before we dive into that content and agenda, just a little bit about us. Some of you may be new to CSC or certainly partner with us today in some capacity. Just know that we are really here to help support you in primarily any area of your business function. We pride ourselves on being the business behind business and currently are the world's leading provider of business administration and compliance solutions globally. As you can see here, we work across the globe. We work with a lot of different clients across different sectors everywhere. And we have a lot of trust in CSC, and we really can prove that by being in business for over 125 years at this point.

So with that being said, again, if you have questions about us, we're happy to answer. But we're going to shift gears into the bulk of our presentation and that annual report versus business licenses. Trent, I think I'll pass it to you.

Trent: Great. Thanks, Calla. And so with annual reports, the first thing to understand is what is an annual report. We're talking about company filings required of legal entities that are formed or registered in a state, most often done annually and with specific filing requirements depending on the jurisdiction in which you were registered or formed. It is a way to provide basic entity information in order to maintain your good standing status, essentially your authority and lawfulness to transact business at the state level. We'll talk about sort of more localized filings that may be necessary with business licenses and permits. But we're talking first at the state level that is oftentimes a precursor to those additional filing requirements that may be needed.

And with these filings, you're providing basic information, such as your principal place of business, your mailing address, registered agent details, names and titles and addresses of officers and directors, usually accompanied by a state filing fee. Now this is, again, for any type of legal entity, so corporations, limited liability companies, limited partnerships. And sometimes it can be confused with an annual report that is required of not-for-profits or publicly traded companies, where you're also providing financial performance and graphs and operational data from the prior year. That is something that is separate. This instead is talking about a statutory requirement to maintain the status of your company at the state level wherever you may be registered to do business.

It's very important to make sure that you file these on time. Even if nothing has changed from the prior year, you still have a filing obligation and a deadline to meet. And it impacts directly the right to operate legally, and you risk severe fines and penalties for non-compliance. And we'll kind of talk now about how this is both similar to and different than the business licenses and permits.

Arianne: Great. So business licensing, I would say it's a little bit like the Wild Wild West. You might be filing at a number of different jurisdiction levels. So we have federal licenses, state licenses, county, city, and then we also see beyond the city level. So it might be a parish. It could be a township. It could be a fire department, a school district, a tribal land. So these are all examples of jurisdictions that you may wind up having to file a business license with.

And we use the term "business license" pretty loosely because we have to look at why it's required. In some cases, a business license is just required to do business, meaning you are doing business in this jurisdiction. They require you to file some type of license to perform business.

Additionally, though, we see business licenses that are really more specific to a product. So an alcohol permit, a tobacco permit, a fuel permit, a contractor license, these are all examples of permits and licenses that are specific to either a product or a service. So in many jurisdictions there's regulation, especially at the state level, but sometimes down at the local level to offer a specific service or product. So those of you guys out there who are in some type of regulated business, you may have things like contractor licenses, pharmacy licenses, tobacco licenses.

And you may even have licenses that are specific to a product that you don't even know you sell. So some examples of where this becomes important is making sure that you have a direct communication with your marketing and your sales team about what products and services you might be selling. An example is, I've seen it personally, a convenience store that wound up being under-licensed because they didn't have a permit to sell bait in a jurisdiction. I've seen cases where they didn't have a dairy permit to sell frosted or frozen desserts. So making sure you know what's being sold at your locations, what products and services your company is offering, and ensuring that that line of business or that product is properly licensed in the jurisdictions.

There are other reasons. Of course, you want to look at making sure you're compliant and that's being filing on time. So you'll see here that as opposed to annual reports, where they are annual most of the time, business licenses could be annual, biannual, quarterly, and these are the most common ones. But we also see everything from 90 days specifically instead of quarterly. We see five-year licenses. We see year and a half licenses. So it can vary quite a bit.

In many cases, the filing obligation is going to be on your anniversary date. So if you applied or received your license on June 5th, then you might be renewing again on June 5th the following year. Some licenses are going to be based on the jurisdiction's issue date or kind of filing period, which could be potentially it expires December 31st, but it's not due until January or February because they're requiring you to collect gross receipts. So there's a grace period between the day it expires and the day it's due.

So also being mindful of not just when to file, but what's the difference between a due date on a license and an expiration date on a license. The expiration is how long it's valid through, and the due is when it needs to be issued out to the jurisdiction or filed.

The last part here is how does it impact you. A variety of licenses can be required to open a new location. So we need to make sure we're licensed on the front end of our business. We need to make sure we are licensed and maintain our licenses through changes, so ownership changes, officer changes, reporting personnel changes, like managers or pharmacists or contractors or qualifiers. These are all examples of maintaining your compliance with jurisdictions. Also, if your company decides to sell new products or services, making sure that we know when those things are happening, that we have that communication open so we can then ensure that we are compliant in order to sell those products or services.

And then, of course, other reasons licensing impacts you is if you fail to file a license, you may not be able to offer that product or service. So imagine trying to launch a grocery store for example and realizing that somebody did not get the license to operate the deli. So all of those food products, all of those hot products, none of those can be sold until that license is up and running. They may still let you open, but they wouldn't let you operate that department. And that also goes for departments like nurseries, meat departments, and things like that. So making sure that we have all the required licenses for the business activities we plan to conduct.

Okay. I'm going to go ahead and move to the next slide here. I'm going to hand this back off to Trent.

Trent: Thanks, Arianne. And so this slide is really talking about the compliance life cycle. And another way to think about it is the entity life cycle. Talking about the creation of the entity itself, and we're talking about creation about the filing of the formation document with the secretary of state or other corporate filing office to create your corporation or limited liability company or other legal entity that is separate in existence from the owners of the company.

Now shortly after formation is when all of your type of maintenance and ongoing compliance obligations begin. There are jurisdictions where there are initial reports due shortly after formation, Alaska 6 months, California 90 days, Washington 120 days. These are jurisdictions where as soon as you form your corporation or LLC, there's an additional initial report obligation before the annual report obligation kicks in the following year.

The annual report term is a slight misnomer. Most jurisdictions have a filing due every single year. But there are some nuances where you might have a jurisdiction like California limited liability companies that have a report due every other year. But it's also important to understand the differences in entity structure and jurisdiction because there are differences even within the same state. California corporations are due every year, for example. And it's really important to make sure that you understand this so that you can maintain your good standing status. Again, that gives you the state-level authority to transact lawfully within that jurisdiction.

Additionally and part of your maintenance is DBA names, also known as fictitious names or trade names. That is a secondary name that you can hold yourself out to the public as. So while you have your legal name, which is what you listed on your formation documents with the state, your DBA or trade name might be what you list out to the public or what is on the sign in front of your store.

And it's really important, as part of maintenance, to also understand that you have to not just track your annual reports, but also, depending on the industry you're in or the products and services or the location where you're doing business, additional licenses and permits in order to continue to operate as necessary.

Now a lot of times we'll see the companies expand over time. You first formed your company in the state of Delaware, and now you are hiring an employee in Pennsylvania. You're opening a business location in Pennsylvania, and you're considering registering your Delaware company to do business in an additional state. We call that a qualification. Industries sometimes call it a foreign registration. But either way, you are taking your business entity and expanding it to transact lawfully in these additional locations. And as part of that, automatically you're going to have to understand that there's probably an annual report filing component to make sure your company remains in good standing.

You're going to do business license research. Again, depending on the industry and the location and other types of factors, what else do you need to file and maintain year after year so you can continue to operate lawfully?

And then, as with sort of the nature of things, it kind of leaves with dissolving or terminating the legal existence of the entity. Oftentimes that's going to be filing a withdrawal, which is to close out a registration in an additional state or dissolving the legal entity itself in the state where you first created it through the filing of the proper paperwork. It's important to kind of tie in annual reports into this because in order to formally dissolve a company, you do need to make sure all of your outstanding annual reports have been filed and the company is in good standing prior to being able to file and submit those documents for acceptance by the state jurisdiction. Sometimes we also see sort of the life cycle be concluded when an entity emerges out of existence and into a surviving entity.

And sort of what we've discussed here with the entity life cycle, it does provide a glimpse into some of the challenges that may be faced for business licenses and annual reports, which we'll talk about next.

Calla: Yeah, exactly. Thanks, Trent. Thanks for painting a picture for us in a way that's easy to see but also creating some confusion, right? There are so many different pieces and parts that can go into the life cycle of your entity or your compliance year to year or even through the life of the entity. And so as we work with clients in those positions or throughout those phases of the life cycle, we start to understand different challenges that they're experiencing. And these are all things that we've kind of already touched about with some of the other slides, like when things are due, when you know you have to file, or how to understand the information. But these are some of the major or most common compliance challenges that we typically see as we consult and work with clients very similar to you as you join here today.

Number one, I think Arianne maybe highlighted this the most, is just the seasonality behind filings, and there are just periods of time throughout the year where you can have a lot of high filing activity, not just in business licenses but from the perspective of maybe also having different tax obligations or annual report obligations. A lot of these are focused with the end of the year or maybe midyear, things like that, and that will fluctuate throughout the year and also depending on the type of business you're doing. You could have a lot of your licenses, if you're in the insurance space, coming due on your birthday as an individual or different years. So this is never really a constant item. It's something that's forefront of the mind for a little while and then can kind of take a back seat. So the seasonality and just trying to understand your industry, the operations and keeping up with all of that tends to be a bit difficult.

On the opposite side of that, we have just the complexity of what this is. What jurisdictions are requiring items? Have there been changes in regulations? How do you identify those? And how are you really going about doing the proper due diligence to make sure that you're covering all of these pages?

I think there was a question coming in, which maybe we'll also get back to in the Q&A, but this idea of if you're registered with the secretary of state, are you covered, or do you have to then register with different local authorities or other state agencies based on your business? And the answer is maybe. In some cases, yes, that is really a real thing, where you can have one location in the middle of Pennsylvania and have a license requirement for the little village or township that you're operating in. And then, to Arianne's point, you have a city or even a school district tax or something that you're paying in addition to just that being registered in the state.

So there are these little nuances and complexities across just regulations. And then you add in the seasonality and all of that, you are even more complex. And then a lot of this is all tying together if you haven't noticed, but data is driving a lot of this as well because the data that we are using to track not only expiration dates, licenses, what we have, what we don't have, it's also beyond that. It's all of the corporate data. Are we understanding truly what we need to report or what's being reported on those annual reports to then use that from a business license perspective? And sometimes you may not be granted a business license if you are not matching the data accordingly. Maybe you're listing a DBA as the legal entity, but it's actually obviously not the legal entity name. Those are things that can cause additional confusion and complexity across these different types of filings. And having good data is oftentimes challenging because you might have different people or different teams managing these different perspectives, and sometimes there's maybe no correspondence between the two.

And then, lastly, just the expertise behind this. And maybe you're experiencing this now as an organization, or you have in the past. There's just been a major shift in the workforce over the last couple of years that's creating this idea that maybe we're losing institutional knowledge across a lot of sectors. And maybe that's because people are moving on to different roles in the organization, or maybe they're leaving. Or maybe we're just scaling back. Or truly it could be that we are now in a hybrid environment, and some people lose access to corporate data because it's in files or things like that. But we've seen a lot of shifts.

So it's hard to relearn or try to start fresh with these items as they are historical in nature. I think it was either earlier this session, or earlier this morning in the other session, Trent mentioned in certain cases you might lose your name and then maybe have to refile something with the state office. But if you didn't know that as someone new coming into these roles, that can really have a large impact on next filings or things that you're doing.

So these are just a lot of common challenges that we experience as we work with clients like you, and maybe you're experiencing some of these today. And these are all things that, again, we'll get to how CSC can help support and create efficiencies to maybe eliminate a lot of these down the line.

Okay. And again, we touched on this a little bit as well, but the big thing here is what happens when you're not in compliance and if you're experiencing these challenges that are leading to missed filings or reporting things incorrectly. Maybe I stole your thunder, Trent, on the loss of name. But there are a lot of things that can happen both on the annual report front and the licenses. So Trent, would you highlight the annual reports for us, please?

Trent: Yeah. Yeah, Calla beat me to it a little bit, and I'll expand on that in terms of the consequences of non-compliance for not filing your annual report, again, the filing that is due at the state level for your business that is formally registered in a jurisdiction. And if your business is registered in multiple jurisdictions, you need to be aware of the different jurisdictional requirements for your entity type in that particular state.

The first thing that's worth noting is that all of the entities at the state level are public record. You can go on the state's website, and you can see companies that are registered there. You can see basic entity details, and you can also see whether or not they're in good standing. So the first thing is for reputational purpose you want to make sure that you stay compliant.

Another thing that I see quite often is someone doesn't even realize when they fall out of non-compliance because they're tracking it themselves. They don't realize they missed a deadline. And the first time they become known to them is when they're alerted by the state agency saying, "Oh, you are now administratively canceled or revoked for not filing on time." Or worse, a client or a business partner notifies you saying, "Oh, we have this deal going on, but you need to be in good standing and you're not. We need to correct this immediately." And we'll see some of that with business licenses as well, what kind of detrimental effect that can have for non-compliance.

As was mentioned, the loss of name. You create your business. You have all this information and marketing materials and this brand. And if you don't file on time, you fall out of compliance and you wait too long to reinstate, you could actually lose your name because somebody else inadvertently chooses to form a company, register a company with the same name, and now that legal entity belongs to them.

By way of an example, in Florida, your name is reserved for one year following administrative dissolution or revocation. It means the state on their own took action to cancel your registration to transact business at the state level. After one year, that name becomes available for use. In California, similarly after two years of a missed filing, you become suspended. And once you're suspended, that name becomes available for other companies to utilize.

Another example of a consequence is again jurisdiction specific. You fall out of compliance because you did not file on time, and instead of just being able to file those past due annual reports, you actually have to file or re-register, re-qualify your company all over again. So now there's a gap in the history of good standing within that jurisdiction, which could have consequences for the ability to operate and enter into business contracts and actually run your business, sell your products and services.

And then sort of a last thing worth mentioning is that you cannot legally close or dissolve your business if you're not in good standing when it comes time to file that paperwork. So as a prerequisite to filing a dissolution document, for example, your company needs to be in good standing, all annual reports filed to date before you could then file that paperwork with the state.

And Calla will discuss a little bit more about business licensing and how it's similar and how it's different to that.

Calla: Yeah. So I think very similar in this space we have delays of being able to offer product, services, or bid on opportunities. So it can have a trickle-down effect too. But ultimately, if you're working in an industry like construction, engineering, or something where you're on-site or need to provide a bid prior to having that work approved, if you're not licensed in those particular jurisdictions, you may not even be able to submit something, or ultimately you could have your site shut down and timelines extended. That adds more money, things like that into the mix. So all fairly negative items here.

Negative press is something that maybe we wouldn't have considered previously quite a few years ago. But with the age of social media and technology, it's become a really big thing, where at any given moment, let's say you have a restaurant and you're shut down, someone takes a picture of your store with a notice, that can be very easily circulated and can have a very negative impact on the business and re-openings, depending on what you were actually shut down for.

Fines, penalties, and lawsuits, all real things. I think I just had a call last week with a firm that had mentioned one of their executives had been served a lawsuit previously because a business license hadn't been filed and they were unaware that they were even listed on it. So it's a whole nother story, but it can happen.

Business closures are very, very big. And Arianne had mentioned just maybe closures of portions of businesses because you're not holding the appropriate licenses to do that portion of a grocery store or something like that. But you think about a retail space or something and maybe you can't sell or even open your doors. There are a lot of good examples about those, but they are very, very real and they can happen if you've spent a long enough time out of compliance.

And then the last one, which is a little bit scary and it's very, very overboard sometimes, but arrests can actually happen. So one real life example of this someone came to us and said that they were arrested after a traffic violation because they were listed on a business license that had been out of compliance for years and they were the manager on record for the compliance. The business hadn't been filing it, and there was actually a warrant out for her arrest. And that was really crazy because she hadn't worked with that organization in years. So there are a lot of real things that can happen. Again, arrests are very much on the opposite end of the spectrum. You're very more likely to see fines, penalties, and closures than anything, but just a good indicator that it can be any amount of bad things really that can happen to you throughout that.

Arianne: All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about how CSC can help. So I'm going to turn it over to my team, and we're going to look through different ways that we can address some of the challenges we've talked about today. So let me turn it over to Calla and Trent to talk a little bit about why you might want to partner with CSC.

Trent: Great. Thanks, Arianne. And so one of the first things that comes to mind is in terms of security. Security is so important in having the trust and confidence in who you're using, whether in this line of business or in any other type of business, to assist you with your ability to operate and service your own clients, especially important when it comes to compliance and regulatory filings that are needed in order to transact lawfully and to provide those services. And in today's day and age, so much information is available online We talked about how your basic ID detail, you can be seen publicly in terms of are you in good standing, basic information in each state in which you're registered. There's also a lot of information that's not publicly available online. And so that could be your ownership percentage, who the owners are for private companies. It could be internal shareholder agreements, resolutions, other type of minutes and documents that all oftentimes wants to remain private but can still be housed within our entity management platform.

And so with CSC, we are a truly global company with employees located worldwide and with our clients located worldwide too. And so we have an extra emphasis on security. And for us, that means that we are fully GDPR compliant, which is a strict European rule protecting personal data. And we meet the strictest of requirements for all of our clients, some of which include banks, financial institutions, and other very highly regulated companies. We provide that same level of security whether you are an entrepreneur or whether you are one of these very highly-regulated industries yourself.

All applications and data are maintained on CSC servers, networks, and data storage systems, which are located within ISO 27001-compliant, SOC audited location facilities here in the United States. And we safeguard our clients' critical and confidential data, making sure it remains available only to our clients and available whenever it is needed, 24/7/365 days a year able to log in to your account and access information related to your business licenses or your annual report filings or your entity data, other documents that you store within the system.

We also have internal controls, which grant different users different permissions within your own company. So you could have your litigation and legal team having access to legal documents. But you could also hide that access from other individuals that shouldn't be seeing that. Similarly, you can have additional permissions for individuals on the finance team to see financial data, within your human resource team to see people data. You're able to kind of allow and restrict access depending on what meets your own internal company's security protocols And that is something that is a standard that CSC follows internally as well.

Now in terms of decreasing burden, that's going to be hugely important. It's something that Calla mentioned earlier in terms of workflow and effort needed, and something that we see as a challenge oftentimes in today's day and age where people have a hybrid working environment, or possibly somebody retires and you lose information and knowledge, or somebody goes somewhere else. And so all of that adds additional effort, especially when we see work volumes increasing and the ability to handle that work volume not being able to keep up.

And what we really focus on doing here is having the information related to the service that we provide automatically integrate into CSCNavigator, which is a platform for real-time access to the status of your entities and your documents. And when you partner with CSC, you also have access to real people that are here to help you with whatever questions you may have. We provide free and unlimited training and are constantly listening to our clients to customize delivery to meet each company's needs. We realize that no two companies are exactly alike.

We also have other tools, such as API integrations with client and industry-leading applications that help also promote the efficiency and decrease unneeded duplicative efforts adding information into multiple systems. And you could use our platform as your source of truth across numerous governance and company-related activities. And that kind of segues into our ability to provide increased transparency to you.

Calla: Yeah, exactly right. So Trent mentioned our technology, how you can store things where you can see everything, and that's really creating a centralized space to share with you any amounts of data that you're really given access to, especially if you have different permission structures within the system. But the idea behind the partnership is we give you a space to see what you have going on. You can see the expiration dates. You can see what is CSC's responsibility or not, what we're working on, or what you are responsible for. So there's a lot of information that you're able to find. And then, at the end of the day, you're able to increase the transparency you have just into any of your compliance filings at any given time.

When we look to the next, reducing complexity, having the increased transparency, and less of an administrative burden on your end, obviously, that's going to reduce the overall complexity of compliance in general. Having a place to go to find that, find the expiration dates, store information about those filings, it makes it much easier to understand and appreciate the complexity, rather than maybe experiencing some hard times from it. So these are all things that not only our technology does for you, but we also have services that we'll dive into that can have, like Trent mentioned, those real people helping and assisting with the administrative burdens or the complexities behind the filings.

So that really translates into our next segue, which is just what do we have to offer in order to help alleviate some of these challenges you may be experiencing and create some of these efficiencies or best practices within your compliance department. And to start, I just want to be clear we have a lot of full-service solutions, which is CSC stepping in to do the work on your behalf. And then we also will transition a little bit after this into what more of a self-managed perspective with another system that Arianne will cover for us.

So to start, we have these, again, full-service options, where CSC is doing the work on your behalf and making your life easier. We have that across annual report prep and filing services. So I think there was a question here. Can CSC help with state filings or state annual reports? Absolutely. And Trent will walk you through how that works.

We also have a license renewal outsourcing service, where you can have CSC take on the management of your existing portfolio and also help you expand into new jurisdictions with new applications. And to highlight the biggest, the most answered question on the poll for business licenses, we also offer research to help you uncover the license requirements and find out what you might need as you move into different jurisdictions or where you currently are.

So Trent, if you wouldn't mind with the annual reports.

Trent: Yeah, great. Thanks, Calla. And so as the name correctly illustrates, this is a preparation and filing service. We do both. So we will work with our clients to obtain the information needed for the filing, prep the filing with information, enter it in, submit it to the state for submission, and then return the filed evidence, showing that it's been completed and that you are compliant in that jurisdiction. And again, there are different jurisdictional requirements depending on whatever you are registered to do business and depending on the entity type.

Really what it starts with is conducting an initial audit of the status of all the entities in every jurisdiction. And we handle filings in all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, all U.S. territories, such as Guam, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, and all Canadian provinces and territories.

What we do is we also send you a reminder 45 days in advance of these deadlines, letting you know what is coming due, what information may be needed. Some information, again as we mentioned, may stay the same from year to year, but other times it can be different. And so part of the filing service that we have with our submission also includes franchise tax reports. So that is sort of slightly different than just the corporate entity annual report itself, where you also have a secondary component that includes a financial calculation. And so in those instances, as was alluded to with Delaware, we can help you calculate how much money is owed, and then we can also submit that payment on your behalf as well. We invoice after the fact in most cases, which also goes back to decreasing the administrative burden, where you can focus on what is in front of you and not have to worry about back and forth prior to the filing being successfully submitted.

And all this information automatically is updated in the entity information system, Navigator, which is the online client platform. The data populates based off of the entities that are in the system in the jurisdictions where you're listed as formed or doing business and is tied directly to our backend Knowledge Base, which is audited and updated daily by its own dedicated team. And within this platform, you can manage deadlines, filing status, other details in the calendar, providing transparency of the status of the filing process.

And on the next screen, we're going to see a glimpse of what that looks like. So this is actually a screenshot from within our Navigator platform and our Compliance Calendar, that provides a comprehensive view of the annual report data and entity data, which is going to, again, allow you that full transparency into the status of the registrations that you have.

We provide automated report due date calendaring within this platform. And again, we upload the evidence directly into the portal as a PDF so you can pull it and retrieve it. You can see past years' data, which sometimes can be helpful in the current year, seeing what was listed, does anything need to be changed, sort of as a benchmark for the filing. All that is available to you within the platform.

But again, looking here, you have total visibility into all of your registrations, the name of the entity, what state it is located, and what type of filings are coming due, the due date. And looking at that one column, you also see whether or not it is being handled by a CSC manager or in-house, meaning that it would be handled by your own team internally. But either way, all this data is available to you. And there are also about 30 other fields not on the screen that can be viewed and rearranged by each user to customize their own grid.

But if you are working with us, the status will be updated in real time. Whether there is a request for more information, or whether it's been submitted to the state, or whether it's been filed successfully, all of that is going to be available to you right here. And what that means is you can get rid of your own Excel or Word file or whatever system that you're using to house your own and manage your own filings and use a system that is designed and purposeful exactly for this specific filing and entity management data.

And so what we're doing here is we're working together to manage those filing obligations and make sure that you maintain your compliance in each jurisdiction and where you're registered.

Calla: Wonderful. Thank you, Trent. So moving on, again from the full-service side, we're transitioning into just our business license obligations here and how CSC can help support that. A lot of you had answered that poll question that understanding business license requirements is a little bit hazy, and so we are here to help. We do offer different kinds of tailored research that is pretty comprehensive to help you understand what your license obligations could be as you either expand into new jurisdictions and new markets with new products or services, and also maybe how you can approach a scenario with an existing location and maybe operations that you've lost track of or sight of or you've just inherited, or maybe you're going through M&A and you have now acquired something that you're unsure of.

So those are the two that we'll highlight today. The new location research is lending to those new markets, new places, places you've never had licenses before. So what you're able to do is provide CSC with a detailed understanding of what your business activities are going to be within those jurisdictions, so when we are able to provide those results, we can tell you if there are industry-specific requirements. For example, if you're a contractor, do you have a contractor's license? Is there a specific class for an electrical contractor versus a commercial building contractor, things like that. And then we can also drill down to those local levels of government to understand if there are any local industry-specific requirements, but also those general licenses that we talked about previously, like a business license, a business tax receipt, occupational license, or something else based on the city and county that you're performing work.

So that's available to you. We do provide a full report that outlines the license findings, anything that you need to know about the actual filing itself, any fees, and how to really move forward effectively.

And then on the opposite side of that, the existing location research is really reserved for places where you have a little bit of a question mark. Again, maybe you've inherited this role, and no one left you data. CSC can help uncover the existing data of any licensure based upon your locations and your business activities. Are these licenses in compliance? Are they past due? Are there remedial actions? Are you missing something? Is there any gap in your coverage today? How can we help you get that new application done? And then this would be nice if it happened a lot more, but is there any possibility that you're over-licensed? Do you reside outside of city limits but you have a city license that you weren't required to have? Are there any things like that in your portfolio?

So our report can help identify all of those items for you and shed some really great light on what your actual landscape is today, what you need to be doing that you're currently not, and anything that might have fallen through the cracks. So that is definitely available to you any time. It's an ad hoc service, but it is CSC going out and tailoring that research based on your specific business activities.

Now on the opposite side of that, we think about what do you do when you already know about licenses you have or we uncover these licenses through research. Well, we are here as a renewal outsourcing provider. Very similar to the annual report preparation and filing services, we can perform a very similar service for the business licenses. We are going to create technology very similar to what you have just seen with the annual report compliance calendar, which allows us to centralize all of your data in one single secure place that's visible to you any time that you want to log in, obviously backed by those security standards that we have as a company.

And what that is designed to do is provide you that administrative relief, where you're getting a dedicated point of contact. That individual is helping manage those expiration dates automatically, starting those processes about 60 days in advance of expiration. Obviously, there are different rules from different jurisdictions, so sometimes we can't start that far in advance. But if we can, we will. We get the forms. We prep them to the best of our ability, send you notices of missing data or other supporting documents, and then we can effectively submit those licenses, help process payments, and make sure that all of those steps are taken care of, and then ultimately curating the data into that platform.

We call it our Business License Portfolio Management system, which I'm going to share on the screen here. This would just become the listing of all of your licenses that CSC is managing and any of their applicable data, like copies, entities that hold the licenses, the names, types, expiration dates obviously. Renewal frequencies can even be here, so we can help you understand how often we're going to be touching those filings.

And then you'll note that there is an order status here, down at the bottom right, that really just will tell you the progression that CSC is taking throughout those filings, if we're touching it during that time. You'll know when things are in process, when they're new, when they're being prepared, when they're submitted, if there is something that we need from you.

So this is just a very quick glimpse into what this would look like. If you feel like these are services that maybe you'd like to add to your CSC purview or maybe even start a relationship with CSC on, please let us know and we can follow up with you after the webinar.

To switch gears a little bit, I'll pass it over to Arianne because we have that other phase of CSC is how our technology can help you do these things more efficiently. Arianne.

Arianne: Perfect. So one of the things we want to talk about is other than us doing the work for you for business licensing in particular, we also have a self-service application, called CSC License Pro. This is a software that clients would implement in-house to manage their licensing through a centralized database across all their different teams. So we see our License Pro software being used with companies across all different demographics, all different businesses, and we really want to make sure that we highlight those tools and how you guys can also do self-managed compliance.

So some of the key features that I think are worth mentioning for License Pro is that, in License Pro, when you are setting up the application and you're onboarding your data records, we have the ability to set up custom workflows. We have custom workflows for renewal management. So you'll see the ability to design renewal workflows. And this is important because with some of the licenses that we see out there, there are a lot of requirements. So things like certificates of insurance, bonds, notaries, your licenses may require a number of different tasks and steps to be completed in order for that license to be good to go. You will be able to design those by state, by jurisdiction, by type, to make sure that when you add licenses down the road, you've already established a standard operating procedure.

Now we also have custom workflows. You'll see that on the other side of this slide, and I'd like to kind of touch on them together because renewal workflows are going to address that day-to-day work of dealing with renewals. But custom workflows are going to enable you to take the other business processes that support licensing and put them all into the same system So those things might be openings, closures, remodels, relocations, onboarding new employees, making sure that professionals are licensed properly. So creating standard procedures within the application to deploy other processes, and that allows you to assign different tasks to different team members, making sure that the right people are involved within the business process.

Now anytime we're talking about these workflows, we're also going to be supporting deadlines that they use. So that means alerts and notifications to make sure everybody involved or everybody who needs to be aware is getting the correct notification. This is both about visibility and accountability.

Now we have automation in the system to really automate the things that are considered busywork, payment processing, document management, checking off tasks, and also reminders and making sure the deadlines are completed. We also have automation around data collection. So if we slide over to our right and look at integrations, we can bring in standard data that might normally need to be manually collected. So things like personnel, gross receipts, employee count, real estate information, all of that can be data that integrates with internal systems so that you have that live real-time information right there with your licensing data to get that automated.

Now altogether we're going to be having a lot of work that we manage in the system. So that means that our dashboards and our homepages allow you to customize the widgets and the views so that you are able to manage your key performance indicators, making sure that everybody is up to date, that leadership has the right information, and that we are able to kind of get that visibility for everyone who needs to be involved and accountability as well.

Now License Pro is a web-based application. So all the data security we've talked about before comes into play. And you can see from this screen, this is one of the views that you're going to see with the software if we're managing licenses. But up on the top side, you're going to be able to see all the different types of data we manage, from entity data to site data to licenses, individuals, inspections, contract management, and equipment management. And all of that also supports reporting and also exporting. And then we have a forms library to assist with research. So there's a lot this application provides for the in-house teams to do the compliance within a single application.

Now I know we've covered a lot, and again, I'll just recap that CSC offers services for both annual reports and for business licensing. So we have service that we can do the work for your teams, and we also have software, like License Pro, to help you do your own self-managed compliance.