Compliance Templates

It depends on where you operate, who your customers are and what data you handle. Businesses selling services to other companies are most often asked for a SOC 2 report or ISO 27001 certification. Anyone that accepts or processes card payments falls under PCI DSS. Organisations handling personal data face GDPR in the EU and UK and CCPA/CPRA in California, and US healthcare adds HIPAA. US-listed companies run SOX, US defence contractors need CMMC, and many EU organisations in critical sectors now fall under NIS2. Manufacturers and their supply chains are often asked for ISO 9001, ISO 14001 or ISO 45001 certification. Organisations that build or use AI in the EU now have the EU AI Act to meet, often alongside an ISO 42001 management system, and public-facing websites are increasingly held to the WCAG accessibility standard by laws such as the European Accessibility Act.

Ongoing compliance requires treating it as a continuous operational process rather than a periodic project. The key practices are: assigning ownership of every compliance requirement to a named person rather than a function, establishing recurring review and monitoring schedules aligned with each requirement's frequency, maintaining contemporaneous evidence of compliance activity as it happens rather than reconstructing it before an audit, and having a documented corrective and preventive action (CAPA) process for addressing non-conformances when they are identified. CheckFlow's recurring templates and task assignment features make each of these practices operational rather than aspirational.

Compliance is the ongoing state of meeting regulatory requirements — the policies, processes, and controls that ensure obligations are consistently met. An audit is the periodic verification that compliance is being maintained — an independent assessment of whether the controls are in place, are being followed, and are producing the intended results. Good compliance management makes audits straightforward; poor compliance management means audits become stressful events that reveal gaps rather than confirming a well-managed programme.

Every CheckFlow template is fully customisable. Add requirements specific to your regulatory environment, adjust task assignments to reflect your team structure, set the frequency that matches your compliance calendar, and add the evidence-capture steps your specific auditors require. When a regulatory update changes a requirement, the updated template deploys to all future runs while completed historical records remain unchanged.

Start with the obligation that has a date attached: a customer asking for a SOC 2 report, a PCI DSS assessment falling due or a certification audit already booked. Run the readiness or audit template for that framework first, then set up the recurring controls it depends on as their own scheduled checklists. Frameworks overlap heavily, so evidence from one, such as access reviews, vendor assessments and incident response tests, usually supports the next.

Keep one register of every dated obligation, with an owner, a backup, a lead time and the evidence each one needs. The Annual Compliance Calendar Checklist builds that register, turns each line into a recurring schedule and runs monthly and quarterly check-ins so nothing reaches its deadline unstarted. Yearly reviews such as the policy review and conflict of interest declarations then run as their own scheduled checklists, while event-driven work such as a subject access request or a whistleblowing report starts a new checklist each time it arrives.

14-day free trial, no card required. The Business plan is $10 per user per month after the trial. Full details at checkflow.io/pricing.