Roadmap for Business License Success

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Annie: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Roadmap for Business License Success." My name is Annie Triboletti. I will be your moderator kicking things off today.

Joining us today are Calla Heathman and Arianne Turnier. 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 would like to welcome Calla and Arianne.

Arianne: Hey, everybody. Looking forward to it.

Calla: All right. To kick us off, I just want to share a quick agenda with you just so we can really dive into what we're here for today. First, we'll dive into a little bit about CSC. Not too much. You should at least know a little bit about us since you're here today.

We're going to define some business licenses. That definition can be something that you define a business license as, the jurisdiction does, or really what we define a business license as at CSC because it can be considered so many different things. We'll dive into a lot of the common challenges that we experience when working with clients like yourself in relation to licensing, getting licensed, renewing and managing, overall maintenance, all of that. Really the biggest reason why we're here is how we can help you, so what CSC can do to add to your processes, make things more efficient for you, or just share a little bit about how we can be a trusted partner in the license space.

And then, like Annie had mentioned, we're going to conclude the session today with a quick Q&A. We'll try to save as much time as possible. But I do encourage you to ask questions throughout the session. We do use them at the end, and sometimes we can even get to some of those questions throughout the session in real time.

So with that, again, a little bit about CSC. A lot of you should already know a little bit about us since, again, you're here, you've gotten an email from us, maybe you visited our website, but just a few high-level things here. We are really truly the business behind business. We've been around in the industry for over 125 years, and we kind of support every stage of the business life cycle. So you think about formations, all of the stuff in between, and even further out into global services and financial markets and things like that. We are the trusted source for more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies, and we work with a lot of law firms.

So I'm sure you've experienced CSC in some capacity, and maybe you're partnered with us today or looking to join. But, again, we truly are the business behind business, and we look forward to maybe working with you in further capacity or in the future.

But to kick us off, we're going to, again, start with defining just business licenses in general. This term is so inclusive and also very, very broad. So you might think of business licenses one way. Arianne and myself and CSC or others might think of it another way. But really what's key here is helping define what they are, whether they're general, specific, and also where they fall within the world of CSC. So Arianne, would you maybe like to kick us off with some of that?

Arianne: Yes. So let's talk a little bit about common business license types. I tend to think about licensing in two buckets. We've got our general business licenses, things that are really just needed to do business. So a jurisdiction really regulating the fact that you're operating within their jurisdiction. These often include things like business, occupation, privilege taxes, some kind of tax receipt. And in many cases, jurisdictions that are levying these types of licenses are often looking at other taxes you file to determine if you should be filing a license.

So this is one of those areas where if you have heavy tax responsibility and sales and use, in many cities and counties, you might be looking at general business licenses as a requirement as well because the jurisdictions do regulate just doing business in their jurisdiction. And in many cases that means generating revenue. Sometimes what jurisdictions define as doing business can be a little broader. It could be having employees in the jurisdiction. But revenue is the most common one, and that changed a lot over the last decade as more jurisdictions started to regulate based on gross receipts.

Now the second bucket that I look at is industry-specific licenses. So these are licenses required because of the activities that your company performs. So, for example, licenses related to food and health, contractors, companies in the insurance space, companies that might be involved in liquor and tobacco, or pharmacy. So licenses where they're based on really your industry. And that kind of breaks down into more specific categories, which I'll jump to next.

So, for example, I mentioned doing business is a big part of that licensing. So when we look at the business license basics, what kind of licenses are regulated, how do they regulate you, why and when do you need to file them, doing business is the most common one. If you're in the jurisdiction's borders, you probably need to do business. Now that doesn't always mean brick and mortar. It may mean, again, generating revenue. So you could have a brick and mortar in a town over, but if your employees are doing deliveries into the second town, or if you have service reps like technicians in the second town, you are generating business. That's their point of sale or their point of point of service. So again, really thinking about where do we do business. It's not always regulated to brick and mortar anymore.

Products. So again, this is really where we get into that industry-specific category. So these last three are really about your industry. What products do you sell? Do you sell liquor? Do you sell tobacco? Do you sell eggs? Do you sell bedding? Not gambling betting, but linens and towels. Those little tags on your pillows that say do not remove, that really kind of is that bedding category. And one of the stories I've heard in my career is a convenience store that was close to a beach was selling towels for tourists, and that triggered a bedding license requirement. And we've also heard things like selling dairy or eggs has triggered a business license requirement. But it could also be things like over-the-counter prescriptions. Like again, convenience stores is one of the ones I think of the most because they just have a lot of little products that are in different categories. We don't always think about that when we're getting the locations licensed.

Now the other area has to do with service and activities. So if you're offering a service or engaging in an activity that is regulated by a jurisdiction, a license might also be required. So some examples might be do you have security guards? Do you have contractors? Do you sell a certain type of thing? Are you brokering? So the activities that you are conducting, like the products, will trigger licensing requirements. And these are all really just regulating your business, your company.

The last category I want to mention here, things that we consider kind of some business licenses and what buckets you see them in is professionals. So this is not licensing the business, the entity, or the company. This is licensing your professionals. So if you have doctors, nurses, insurance agents, brokers, underwriters, engineers, gosh, I can think of the list goes on and on and on. But basically these are professionals that need to be licensed on their own, or they need to be licensed on your behalf. So, for example, in the security industry, they need to be licensed as an employee. Whereas a nurse or a doctor is independently licensed, but we still need to make sure that their licensing is up to date because, as an organization, that can put your business at risk if they're not. So managing the licenses of your professionals, especially if they need to be named qualifiers on your licenses, or if they're required for part of your reporting to the state especially, making sure that you have a database to track those people.

Calla: Great. So really transitioning from kind of what business licenses are into what you might be experiencing, and a lot of these common license challenges that we work with, again, Arianne and I are working with clients day in and day out helping to solve license problems or issues or create efficiencies for our clients, so we do hear a lot of these, and a lot of them do come from spreadsheet users. So this may resonate with you in a little bit of a way. But that's really where we want to kind of drive this here.

So on the screen, you'll see some common challenges that we typically hear. And Arianne just alluded to the first one here and maybe can expand upon it. But volume, using spreadsheets or other mechanisms of tracking may become difficult based on the number of licenses that you have, or maybe not even the number of licenses, but how often you need to file them or whether they're, again, related to individuals or entities or kind of all over the place. But the volume and the increase in license obligations over the last, what do you say, Arianne, 5, 10 years things have changed pretty drastically?

Arianne: Yeah, I would agree with that. It's interesting because I work with so many different industries on the software side especially, typically ones that have more crazy regulated licenses, but we see all of it. And I've got clients where they have an average of 25 licenses per property. If you're wondering what the industry is, it's grocery and pharmacy.

Calla: Yeah.

Arianne: So, I mean, I think they have the worst of it in terms of just the complexity of licenses. But you can ultimately, in some businesses, almost multiply the number of locations by a typical average number because there are just that many licenses. And really, around 2008, 2010, we saw jurisdictions really looking at how they could generate revenue from businesses because they were struggling as well from the downturn in the economy. So that license volume has continued to go up as more jurisdictions have realized they could rewrite their statutes to regulate more businesses, especially, like I said, around gross receipts.

Calla: Yeah. So as you can see or hear, the increase of license obligations has driven the amount of licenses that folks have, which really creates this idea of there are too many, whether that be for tracking purposes, maybe you don't know where they are, who had filed them. But ultimately, increasing regulation means more licenses, more obligations, more due dates, more tracking mechanisms needed and creates this challenge of how do we wrap our arms around what licenses are there or even what we know of, right?

A lot of these you'll start to see kind of tied together as well. But the second common challenge that we typically see is data. And really, the idea of just data in general, any kind of data, do we even know what data we have? And in our world, we think of data as what licenses do you have? Do you know that you have a license? Are you tracking it at all? Do you know what the license number is or the account number or when it's due and all of those things that go along with it?

But data isn't just that. It can be much more than just what is the license area. And I know that you mentioned grocery. There's a lot of things that go into it.

Arianne: I can't wait to talk about it.

Calla: Can you explain about the data?

Arianne: Yeah, absolutely. I think data, no matter what you're dealing with, whether you're outsourcing it, whether you're keeping it in-house, data is actually the biggest challenge of licensing. Filling out the form takes some time, but it's not the same amount of time it takes to collect the data needed for the form. So things like gross receipts, real estate information, landlord information, current manager, entity details, all of that type of data, employee count, inventory, this data all needs to go into applications and into renewals. And making sure that there is a strategy for having that data accessible is critical. It's not just about being able to go and grab it on the fly. We want it to be streamlined.

So data is important, and, of course, the data that Calla mentioned is important, just the really core stuff, where am I filing. But if we don't have data, we also can't audit where we're operating.

So, for example, I mentioned you might have license obligations in jurisdictions you're not filing. It's very common for us to have companies come to us and say, "Hey, I'm operating in all 50 states, and I'm operating in all kinds of cities, but maybe I only have technicians. So I have about 200 locations. So should I only have 200 licenses?" And the answer is, "Oh, my goodness, please let's get you licensed properly. Because when it comes to the data, we're talking about: Where are you generating revenue? Where are you having employees?" That data is actually critical. It's not just because we need it on the license forms. It's because we need it to help audit where you're operating, right?

So when we talk about data, we're really talking about also: Where are you operating? Do you have visibility into where your business activities are? So data across the board is critical. And having a strategy for that data is probably the biggest thing that we want to focus on. And that takes us to complexity.

Calla: Thank you. I was just about to say it just all sounds so complex. What else do you have to add there?

Arianne: Well, so I mean, again, I think the complexity in licensing is knowing when I should be filing, right, because I mentioned earlier, what you do as a business will trigger licensing. This is an industry that is very complicated. I like to say there's lots of job security around licensing because you really need to know what's happening in your business. If you don't know what products are being sold at the location, it's hard to be licensed properly. So again, I talk a lot about retailers because they have some of the hardest work. But a lot of times restaurants, grocery stores, their marketing team will put something in the locations and not communicate with the licensing team. So they don't know what activity is happening so they can't get licensed properly. So it's really important to understand what your business activities are. And then again, leading to that complexity, that complexity drives what licenses we need to have, and then the data supports that.

And you might have people who really know your business well, but then turnover happen. And this is where a lot of times we see that outsourcing is a good option when turnover happens because there's nobody at your company who knows what they're doing, right? Sometimes just having your legacy of data collected is helpful for turnover. If you have a new person coming in, they have all the information at their fingertips. But we need a strategy to be prepared for turnover because, again, your employee may win the lottery and move to Aruba and we want to make sure that you guys have a plan.

So turnover is a huge part of licensing. We see it all the time. We have a great staff of people and they leave. Especially if you only have one person doing licensing and sometimes off the side of their desk along with other responsibilities, when they leave, there's no history of what's been done. There's no visibility into what's been done, and that can leave a company pretty paralyzed. But also it can lead you guys to be non-compliant because you don't know what licenses you're supposed to be looking for, which again takes us to this last one, non-compliance.

Calla, what are some of some kind of feedback, from your point of view, on the non-compliance piece before we move on?

Calla: I mean, non-compliance can really be I'll say anything, right? Non-compliance could just be traditionally you're just not licensed. You never knew that there was a license. Leading back to all these other challenges of how many license obligations there are and complexity or even this idea of turnover, right, you could be moving into this role and not know that these licenses exist.

But a lot of things other than non-compliance or just traditionally not filing a license lead to a lot of other things, like financial penalties or not being able to open a store. I mean, I had worked with a client earlier this year who was maybe in a panic and it's grocery. Go figure. But they came to us because there was an issue with their food license. They had a hot food counter, and it was not valid. They didn't renew it, and the city came in and shut that part of the operation down, which was one of the biggest grossing divisions in the entire grocery store, which really they took a financial hit for that not only because it wasn't filed, but because they couldn't then sell the products that really bring in the most money for them.

So financial penalties are huge when we think about non-compliance, probably the biggest thing that we think of. But there are a lot of other things, just like reputational damage. Think about if you have a sign on your store that doesn't let customers in because you failed to follow appropriate compliance. That can be really damaging to brands and just the overall perception of how consumers view you and your products or your services. Maybe you are a contractor and there wasn't a license done properly, and your jobsite gets shut down. That's not only an issue for yourself, but your client and all these other things.

So there is this snowball effect. And not to scare you, but there are some times where we've heard about arrests, which sound utterly crazy.

Arianne: Yeah. It's in the bylaws of those licenses a lot of times.

Calla: It is. And some of that's [outdated data 00:17:45].

Arianne: It's usually the store manager, too.

Calla: Who doesn't even know that they're listed on a license, which again comes back to this data, making sure things are clean. So overall non-compliance kind of is the result of a lot of these challenges. But it is still one of the biggest hurdles within the license space.

There was a comment that came in, and I think it just is particularly helpful to highlight. The attendee said what they find most difficult is navigating the license websites. And a part of that is researching, finding requirements, figuring out what's there. And that kind of leads directly into how CSC can help because we do have strategies and services in place where we can navigate those sites for you and we can make sure that we are taking that heavy lifting off your plate, making it easier for you to understand compliance and licensing, and just ultimately get the things done, or kind of a mix of helping you help yourself do that more efficiently as well.

So that leads into really where we sit in the suite of license solutions. We do have a lot going on here at CSC and a lot of different avenues that we can help with. I myself at CSC focus more on the full-service side of the business, where we are directly assisting clients from an outsourcing capacity, where we have a team of folks that, again, can help take on that idea of license management and making sure that we are hitting the due dates, getting the right things, making those websites and applications easier for our clients to understand. And that's really us on our end doing the work. We also have research services that are wrapped up in that.

And then Arianne, on the other side of the business, who's going to be speaking more about this, Arianne's focus is mostly on how we can effectively help you help yourself and licenses. I don't know if you want to expand upon that, Arianne.

Arianne: Yeah. So I mean a big difference really is do you want to manage it in-house and have total control over everything, or do you want to hand it off to somebody who is an expert? So Calla's team deals with the full-service outsourcing. That means that we do the work for you. And my team deals with the self-service management, which means you may want to keep the licensing discipline in-house. You might want to be able to have that control. You might have a team that has a lot of knowledge. You might have more complex, regulated licenses. You're not interested in handing those over to a service provider. So we're going to look at both of these today and really kind of separate the two conversations. So we're going to start with Calla and the full-service outsourcing, and then we'll wrap up with looking at self-service options if you want to manage your compliance in-house.

Calla: Perfect. So let's kick-start, again, our full-service solutions. Again, CSC doing work on your behalf to free up time and make your life more efficient and solve for those gaps and understanding what licenses are, where you need them, or how to effectively manage them. So to start us off, like I had mentioned, we do have a full suite of research services here at CSC. We have an entire research division that's dedicated to providing really tailored license results to our clients, that are specific to each one of our client's needs based on various different aspects of the business.

So a large part of this is the business activities. I know Arianne talked at length about how those impact license obligations. So first, you define your locations for us. Then we gather information about what your business activities are at those locations. And again, locations can be anything. It can be an address. It can be a city. It can be a state. It could be a region. And your business activities could differ depending on what that location means to you. So we're compiling a lot of this information so we can fulfill different areas for you, whether it's just general licenses, whether it's specific. But we kind of lump these things into I'll say two major buckets, and then there are ancillary research services on the end of that.

So the first bucket would be new locations, as you're expanding the business, whether it's growing organically, opening a new location, providing a new service or product within an existing location, something that's really triggering the need for new licenses that you would not have already gotten or no one else would have already looked into. So again, this new location idea, you come to CSC with the location and the business activities, and we help you uncover the license obligations on the city, the county, local municipality, and state levels of government that would impact your ability to do business in those jurisdictions. A lot of this is then creating a report for you to be able to look at and understand what the next steps are, either by CSC supplying forms for you to be able to effectively file these licenses, or again partnering with CSC to help you fulfill those filings. But this idea is new markets, new places of business, new products and services that you haven't already been doing.

On the opposite end of that, we have this idea that you might not know what you don't know, which is often a lot of times what we hear from our clients about existing locations. And this has come up a lot more frequently because of turnover and the shift in workforces and a lot of things happening within business, where maybe you inherited this license work. Not all companies have a division that's dedicated to this. So you may have inherited someone else's work, someone else's tracker. It's not easily digestible or understandable. Or maybe you just really don't know. You're not sure if anything happened.

This existing location research is more or less like an audit. So we go out and we do that baseline research first, again based on location and business activity, uncover what the obligations are, and then help you identify what has or has not been completed. So if we find that you did, in fact, file a license for an entity, we'll get that for you. What's the license number? What's the expiration date? What's the status of that? And then fill the gap. So is there a license obligation that you didn't meet? Is there something that needs to be done in order to fulfill that?

And then there is this idea that you could possibly be overlicensed. I will tell you it's doesn't happen as much as we'd hope. But it is really something that can happen. Maybe you had an issue navigating a website, like the response that came in, and it's not very clear whether or not that license applies to you. So just out of sheer risk perspective, you decide to get it. But maybe that license only applied to a business that was operating inside city limits, and it doesn't apply to you. And we can help you understand if that is still a necessary requirement.

So those are our two biggest buckets in researching capacities. You do see amendment research on here. I think there was actually a question that came in for strategies on how to effectively make changes to licenses. A large part of that strategy is the help that we have with amendment research, helping you identify, based on the changes you're making, what those governing bodies ask of you. Sometimes you can change so many things about a license or the FEIN or ownership that they say, "Well, this isn't really the same business anymore. Go file a new one." Or they say, "Send us an email." Or they have an extensive paperwork process. Or you've got 12 days to do it.

So this amendment research capacity really enlists CSC to help you understand how to make those changes more effectively with paperwork and when things need to be done. So again, the idea of researching requirements can become easier because you have a partner here within CSC that can effectively help you do these things if you don't have the time, or if you're looking for a better set of eyes with experts that do this every day.

So moving on, really the biggest thing in the full-service space is how do we help you effectively manage licenses with really limited involvement from your team, right? We do still need someone on your end that's going to know a lot of facts about the organization, like if the licenses require gross receipts, or if there are employee counts required or if you need bonds, insurance documents, or other things that Arianne talked about earlier, the complexities of what's included.

But the beauty behind this is that we kind of centralize all of this information for you through our management tool that we call our Business License Portfolio Management system. You'll see centralization here. That's the biggest thing is we want to create you a space that memorializes all of your data related to the licenses and then really gives you a space where when we ask for items, that's where you go to submit them as well. So we're kind of creating this central place so you can have visibility into not only the licenses but the work we're doing.

And again, the biggest key here is that administrative relief for your team. You'd be partnered with a dedicated member of our license team here as your dedicated account manager. We are the ones who are proactively managing those expiration dates and not just expiration dates. I know Arianne will probably talk about this heavily too. Expiration dates sometimes don't matter, and it's about due dates because there are different ways that these jurisdictions like things done or there are different times you have to start. So all of those little nuances about licenses are things that we can track for you.

And then getting paperwork together, going out and getting the forms, or logging in to the portals, tracking changes of those portals. How many times has a portal changed on you and you didn't even know, or the form changed? We do all that work for you. We prep them. Again, we're sending those alerts to you if there is anything in addition to what we already have that's required, creating a better I'll say veil of the unknown, where we are diving into that for you.

And then because we're using our technology, that really helps for us to leverage a lot of security standards to protect your data. So all of our technology is backed by a SOC 2 Type 2 compliance certification, with a lot of really fancy things about tech that I myself might not fully understand, but really just a fancy way of saying when you're sending information to CSC for these licenses, it is safe and secure. You're not leveraging email to send it. You're sending things directly through our technology, which allows us to safeguard a lot of that.

Depending on what types of licenses you have, whether they're professionally related, or even some states, you're going to need to provide some information that you might not have thought of, like Social Security numbers or spousal information. I know that sounds crazy, but it is really true. And we want you to have a safe place to send that to us without doing things via email or having things get lost. So that's why we're kind of centralizing all this within our technology.

And I think one of the biggest things that our clients also love within the outsourcing space is how we can help process payments and make your payment processing easier than maybe what you are experiencing today if you have multiple divisions or if you have to allocate to different entities or other things like that. When we process licenses for you, we do advance the fees to the jurisdictions on your behalf, and then we invoice after. So instead of having to pay each individual jurisdiction as a vendor, you can then just pay CSC as your one total vendor for all of those fees that were due.

So again, a lot of this is kind of simple things, right? The idea behind licenses and management of licenses are very easy, but it's the easy things that sometimes get unwieldy and complex, like just understanding when things are due and with different renewal frequencies and different logins and all of that. And that's what we do really well to help create this idea that we can become an extension of your team, kind of like a part-time employee, and fulfill this work for you.

If you are struggling in any one of these areas, or you're struggling with some of those common challenges, this service will solve for a lot of that, adding CSC as your partner into the mix and again things that we are doing on your behalf. And then with that, we have a really bigger area to help propel your license management internally into a whole new universe by creating efficiencies for yourself. So Arianne, I'll pass it to you on the License Pro.

Arianne: Perfect. So Calla has walked through the services that we offer to companies if you want to have us take over the work. But for all the companies that really do want to keep it in-house, whether that's a financial decision, a complexity decision, you have the right resources in-house, we do have a license management software. We've actually been in the license management software space pretty much since the beginning. We are one of the longest-standing softwares out there. And I believe in terms of software users, we have about like 80%, 78% of the market share. So a lot of folks use our software to manage their licenses in-house.

Our business license software is called CSC License Pro. It was formerly known as License HQ. So you may have heard about it in the market space.

One of the things I like to talk about with License Pro is that the goal here is really to give you a centralized tool to manage all of the compliance. So what I what I mean by that is that compliance isn't just renewing licenses. Compliance is oftentimes research. In many cases, it is visibility and reporting. It's quarterly reports for things that aren't renewals. It's ownership and officer changes. It's manager tracking. It's tracking the compliance data that goes into your filing. So really we want to make sure that we are creating a centralized repository for all of your renewable and repeatable items.

We want to organize and track all the activities you guys have or your project sites, your service areas. And I use that term very loosely because when we say the word "site" or "location" in the licensing space, that's not always a brick and mortar. What jurisdictions consider your location is oftentimes where you do business. So making sure that we're able to track either your brick-and-mortar locations or your service areas. What cities and counties do you generate revenue in or do you operate in? And both of those are supported in the software.

We also want to make sure that we're storing all those demographics that are needed for licensing. So really this is a very powerful tool to centralize everything. And we do that by also integrating with other technology. So if you guys have a site management system, that data can be feeding into License Pro. If you have an employee repository, you can import that data in for employee licensing or manager information. So really making sure that we have all the information needed to do compliance in one place.

Now the other area that I want to talk about is just some of our key features in the software. So with technology, we always want to make sure we've got the important things, like is it a secure environment. We do have a SOC 2 supported software environment. So we make sure we've got all that data security for our clients. But in addition to that, we have really great technology to support the compliance work.

So we have workflow designers for renewal management. And that's because not one license is the same, right? We might have a liquor license. We might have a tobacco license. We might have a contractor or an engineering license. Each of those licenses have different processes. So in our software, you can customize which steps you want your team members to be tracking and make sure that that reporting is clear. So if I needed visibility into where all of my licenses are right now, I wouldn't be trying to figure out in a spreadsheet has it been sent based on the date. I would actually have an idea of what step in the process my team members have completed. Or if it's just me doing the work, I would be able to see where I left off when I last worked on it. Some of these licenses take a couple days to complete because we're collecting data, so being able to customize that workflow.

Now we also, as a software, make sure that you guys are getting alerts and notifications to make sure that everybody involved in compliance knows what's going on. That's an important part of our software. So making sure that notifications might go to leaders, stakeholders, field managers, anybody who needs to know what's happening. I like to even include people like construction development teams because they need to know where we are with licensing. And rather than having a weekly meeting with them, I might just be able to provide them an update on where we are with everything.

And that leads me to our custom workflows. So the custom workflows is one of the features I really like the best because it gets into the other business processes around compliance, so for example, new locations, personnel changes, reporting requirements, surveys, inspections, all the things that really are part of licensing and compliance, again, that we often do off the side of our desk, we manage them in Outlook reminders, spreadsheets, emails, all the complex things that we have to do. Licensing isn't just renewals. It's not just applications. It's all these other processes that go into maintaining compliance, especially if we're dealing with more regulated work, like professional licensing or healthcare licensing or anything like that. And we have a lot of our clients in this space. Again, the more regulated the licensing, the more likely they need technology.

Now automation is another part of our software. We like to automate as much as we can. That means we have importing processes. We have email notifications. We have the ability to create reoccurring procedures. Data requests to other people using our notification. So really automating all of the manual tasks in the licensing process so we can get our work done. One of the things we often see is that clients will typically reduce the time spent on the busy work of licensing by more than half. So imagine just being able to reduce some of that resource time so we can allocate it to other things.

Now the software also has a dashboard, a homepage that allows you to create visual indicators of what's going on, being able to see where all my calendar items are. We saw it in the previous slide. So that homepage has real visibility into what's going on with the work.

And then as I mentioned earlier, we have integrations. That includes things like single sign-on, integrating with your site management. We have a full payment processing cycle so you can track everything that was paid, generate your check requests out of the software, track your credit card payments, your usernames, your passwords. Again, all the things that go into payment processing is tracked in here. So really making sure that we have a single place to do everything.

Now before I kind of move on to the next slide, I just want to remind everybody that we also have a Q&A section here. If you have questions about what we've been covering, or you have questions you want us to follow up afterwards, please pop that question into the Q&A. We'll have one of our team members reach out to you if you have a specific question, or we'll try to answer your question when we have our Q&A time at the end of the call. So again, look forward to kind of getting to that. But please don't hesitate to put that in the Q&A.

And again, just as a recap, License Pro, the goal here is to give you guys an empowered tool that includes centralizing your data, automating your workflows, integrating with other softwares, and we also have a research component within the software as well. Now you can also pair our License Pro software with some of the research services that Calla mentioned earlier as well. So those are other options if you need a little bit of both.

Calla, I'm going to turn it over to you to talk about why we should partner with CSC. We'll kind of tackle this one together.

Calla: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that really sets CSC apart in the marketplace is our industry-leading security standards, that we really value our clients' data and information with the utmost respect, and really we handle it the way that we want ours handled. So that's really important in the license space.

Again, depending on the license types, I mean, even general business licenses require a lot of information that you may not consider relevant, again, spousal information, Social Security, things like that. But it gets even more intense as we think about professionals and really regulated industries. So not only from an outsourcing capacity, but from a License Pro capacity and doing it on your own, all of our technologies are backed by the highest amount of security that we can offer for you to ensure that all of your information that you're storing or sending or using within the CSC space is safe and secure. And that's a really, really big thing.

With cyber attacks and all of that, everything going on, I mean, it really is huge when we think about data and the way it's stored and making sure it's even accessible with all of that information within our technology. I don't know if you have anything else to add, Arianne.

Arianne: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the important takeaways that I always like to see is that we support companies that are really heavily regulated in the security space. So we also work with our international partners. So we have the EU standards for data security, as well as California standards, which is probably the most rigorous ones that we really see out there. But we support healthcare companies, banking companies. So I promise you, they make us go through some pretty strict security assessments. So those security questionnaires are just part of our job to make sure that we're giving everybody the peace of mind to meet those security requirements.

Calla: Yeah.

Arianne: That kind of leads me to like the administrative burden. We really want to make sure that we're giving you peace of mind. Whether you are outsourcing it to us, whether you're using software, the ultimate goal is to reduce the busywork, right? Licensing has a lot of busywork. It has a lot of data management. It has a lot of research involved and just tracking. And so, again, whether we're focused on the technology, whether we're focused on the services, the important takeaway here is that we're reducing the busywork, the burden that it has for your team on the kind of day-to-day stuff so that you can focus on other compliance matters.

Compliance doesn't stop with just renewing licenses. There's a lot that goes on to many of your roles. Whether you're on a tax team or a legal team or a facilities or an operations team, there are other things that you have to focus on that maybe have a higher ROI for your company. Let's kind of help you get this stuff kind of reduced so that we're not spending so much time on it.

Calla: Yeah. And I think you talked a lot at length about the increased transparency that you get within License Pro alone. Thinking about the ability to share this license data across teams and with different divisions that maybe need access to it. So whether it's partnering with License Pro or partnering with CSC for outsourcing, our technology all allows for unlimited user capabilities, which does allow for increased transparency, not only of the data, the licenses information, but more importantly when and how is this work being completed.

From an outsourcing perspective, we do include status updates. So you can log in at any time and see where CSC is in process of filing a license, whether it be we're getting applications or we've submitted them or we've requested information from you. And very similarly, within the workflow process in License Pro, you'll be able to see work that you or your colleagues have done throughout the license process.

So it's just creating an additional set of eyes within the space, which ultimately when you have that increased transparency, we're going to assist with reducing the complexity behind all this stuff, whether it's, again, CSC doing that work for you, helping with research, helping demystify licenses and where things are, and managing the application process, or understanding what requirements are. Conversely, License Pro can really transform your whole process by helping you create those workflows and standard operating procedures and things that just make your life easier as you move into different jurisdictions. Or you go back to that renewal from the previous year, if you're leveraging that technology, your complexity of that license is really null and void because you've now documented all of this stuff for yourself, creating a lot of clarity, not complexity.

So all of this together is how a lot of our clients find success partnering with CSC, and we hope that you'll see a lot of this in our services. I think Arianne had mentioned if you're thinking about these, if you have questions, please do drop them in the Q&A as we're about to transition into that. But also, let us know, that we can reach out to you after. We can have one-on-one conversations with you. We can explore the products. We can provide demonstrations of the technology to see how it may be a better fit for you, whether it be outsourcing or License Pro. And we just encourage you to let us know how we may be able to support you.