Complying with a Pandemic

As Australia and New Zealand start to loosen the grips of lockdowns and businesses get back to work, you may find that costs for compliance are growing...

In short, the biggest element of compliance will be your time.

Good Ideas

A prime example of this was flagged with me over the weekend while sharing a few Zoom-drinks with friends who run a small electrical company. They have six staff in total and do a mix of domestic and light commercial work, all in the Christchurch region.

New Rules

Since the lockdown rules were flagged to be relaxed last week, they’ve been inundated with documentation that they need to complete. This is not from the government, but from their clients — it’s what they need to do to comply with other companies compliance rules!

These weren’t just documents that need to be signed-off by the business owners, but rather each staff member had to complete each form and sign it. Their only way to do this was to print out each document, get each staff member over to their home to complete, scan them and send them back. They have no simple way to automate this process, and they foresee that this is the ‘new norm’…

That’s only the start of a full time paper battle — they’re going to need to keep detailed records of who’s complied, and who was onsite when, plus of course that the actions they’ve agreed to are being undertaken. Did those gloves get disposed of correctly? Is everyone maintaining the correct social distance...

FileMaker + DocuSign!

When I mentioned that we’ve built solutions which used FileMaker integrations like DocuSign, and they could pretty much automate their whole process, including a robust and legally recognised digital siganture system, their ears pricked up…

But when you’re a small business using ‘off the shelf’ software, investing in a custom build is a bit daunting. So I put my sales hat on again and we did the math on how many hours/days they would save. When you start adding it up, an upfront investment like that starts making a lot of sense: the right solution could save a ½ or possibly full time position.