Getting Started with Compliance
Contents |
Introduction
What is compliance? Compliance, in a general sense, is simply a person’s ability to complete or maintain a set of standards put forth by a regulatory body. At LearnLive, what we mean by compliance is much more specific; it is a system for tracking continuing education requirements necessary to maintain licensure for CPAs, attorneys, and other types of licensed professionals, and for tracking the progress of your professionals in meeting those requirements. LearnLive’s ComplianceTM product’s engine analyzes the rules from each jurisdiction and ascertains if and when the credits granted to your professionals for participation in continuing professional education (CPE) will make them compliant with the jurisdiction's rules. With LearnLive’s compliance tracking module, you can automate much of the work of aggregating and reporting the status of your licensed professionals to the regulatory bodies in charge of their licensed jurisdictions. Although the compliance tracking module can be used for the accounting and legal industries, as well as to track learning requirements that are specific to your company, the help examples focus on the compliance tracking process for an accounting firm with licensed CPA’s.
- Be sure to read Understanding the LearnLive system for a basic overview of how this software works.
- For a full list of help topics tailored for the LearnLive ComplianceTM product visit, Compliance. If you do not see the topic you are looking for, or to see the full list of topics for the entire LearnLive platform, see Continuum.
Setting Up Housekeeping
Understand your Company's Jurisdictions
The LearnLive compliance engine tracks CPA jurisdictions in all 50 states, as well as several national jurisdictions. LearnLive keeps a summary of the rules for all the CPE jurisdictions covered by the LearnLive ComplianceTM product in our wiki.
- These summaries are available here: CPE Jurisdiction rules.
Your first order of business should be to identify the jurisdictions in which the licensed professionals in your firm are licensed. This may be simple (they're all licensed only in your home state) or complicated (many professionals licensed in multiple states), depending on your company's business. Once you have figured out which jurisdictions to add, you have various approaches to adding them into the system.
Getting Users Into the System
Import User Profiles or Upload Manually
If you are new to LearnLive, basic account information for your licensed professionals will be uploaded as part of the onboarding process. If you are migrating to LearnLive Compliance Version 2.0 from Version 1.0, you will likely already have user profiles stored in your company's account. In both cases, however, you may wish to add user profiles one by one, or in bulk.
- To add a single user profile, see this article: Create a user profile.
- To add multiple user profiles at once, see this article: Add or edit many users in bulk.
- To edit an existing user profile, see this article: Edit an existing user profile.
Fill out Jurisdiction Profiles for your Users
In the LearnLive system, user profiles consist of two parts: the basic user profile, containing name, contact information, and company-specific information, and the jurisdiction profile, which contains items of information specific to Compliance, such as license numbers, license dates, and jurisdiction-specific information for every jurisdiction in which a professional is licensed. Once you have a basic user profile in existence for each professional you wish to track you can begin constructing the jurisdiction profile for that user’s Compliance.
Once your professionals have accurate user profiles in the system, you are ready to add jurisdictional information to each profile. If you are migrating to Version 2.0 from Version 1.0, or are in the middle of your onboarding process, some of this information will be automatically populated for you. However, you should still review it to check for accuracy. In any case, you may at some point need to add, edit or remove a jurisdiction for a specific user. The following articles explain how to do this.
- To add a jurisdiction to a user profile, see this article: Track a jurisdiction for a user and Jurisdiction Profile Guide.
- To edit an existing jurisdiction in a user profile, whenever a license is renewed, or an exemption starts or stops, or when some item of information specific to that jurisdiction changes in status, see this article: Edit the jurisdiction profile for a user.
- To remove a jurisdiction from a user profile, see this article: Stop tracking a jurisdiction for a user.
Our system allows you to automatically filter the jurisdictions that appear in your web interface, to make your workflow easier and faster. Every time jurisdiction information appears--in user profiles, in program and session accreditation tables, and so forth-- a complete list of ALL jurisdictions is displayed by default. Because this list is quite long, you have the option of customizing it.
Let's say your firm is based in Hawaii, and all your professionals are all licensed in Hawaii, and a few of them are also licensed in Alaska, California, and Washington. You can edit your company's settings so that everywhere jurisdiction lists appear, they will show only those jurisdictions you find relevant-- Hawaii, Alaska, California, and Washington.
It is not necessary for you to designate a subset of jurisdictions for your company: you can certainly work with all jurisdictions if you choose. If your firm is large, and contains a large variety of licensures, you may wish to always work with the full list. The choice is up to you.
- To configure your company account to automatically use only certain jurisdictions read this article: Designate company jurisdictions.
If your company's contract with LearnLive includes any custom-built jurisdictions, that is, jurisdictions that are specific to your company rather than common to a state licensing board or nationwide organization, then these jurisdictions will appear automatically in your list. For more information on custom jurisdictions and how they work, please contact your account representative.
Tracking Learning Experiences
Create Programs
Now that your users have jurisdiction profiles set up to track Compliance, you may wish to familiarize yourself with how to create programs and sessions, and possibly the most important component for Compliance, understanding how to ensure your users are receiving the appropriate type of credit for their jurisdictions. With LearnLive's other products, you can create and deliver programs using the LearnLive platform, and these are automatically tracked for you in terms of CPE/CLE compliance.
- First off, refer to the following article for a basic understanding of programs and sessions: Understanding programs and sessions
- To create programs and sessions visit, Create a new program and Create a session of a program. For further details on each type of session visit the following:
The LearnLive ComplianceTM Product system uses the NASBA Field(s) of Study and CPE credit amounts saved for the program, along with the Session Type, to assign the Credit Types, Credits and Delivery Types for each jurisdiction. This information is what appears on each user’s Compliance Report, and it is automatically assigned based on the rules built into the system for each jurisdiction as soon as the session is created.
In most circumstances, this automatic credit mapping is sufficient. However, in some cases you may wish to manually override the system’s mapping in order to produce the desired result for the jurisdictions you are tracking. There are also instances when this information cannot be mapped based various factors so in these cases, it is necessary to manually set the appropriate accreditation for each, otherwise there will be no accreditation information saved.
- To familiarize yourself with NASBA’s Fields of Study, visit: Assign fields of study to a program
- For details on how to override the system accreditation, or assign accreditation to jurisdictions with mapping limitations visit: Customize the accreditation for a session.
Create External Programs
With the LearnLive ComplianceTM product, you also can track learning experiences that occur outside the LearnLive system. When your professionals attend a seminar or a conference put on by a third party, and that attendance is worthy of CPE credit, Compliance allows you to integrate records of that learning into the LearnLive system by creating an external program record, sometimes simply called an external program. This is any learning content with a record inside the LearnLive system that was consumed outside the LearnLive system. In other words, an entry for the program exists in one or more users' completion records, but the program does not appear in a LearnLive university and it is not launched through the LearnLive delivery platform.
- To create and set the basic credit value for an external program read this article: Create an external program record.
When you create an external program record, you will provide a base number of credits which can be applied to CPE. The type of CPE credit, and the requirements against which the credits may be applied, will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. As you may know, many jurisdictions have specific credit requirements that have to do with particular subjects, such as auditing, ethics, risk management, and so forth. To properly track compliance with all the requirements of each of your relevant jurisdictions, you need to specify which requirements those credits can be counted against. You only need to specify credits for the jurisdictions that are applicable to the user(s) who participated in the external program.
- For details on how to override the system accreditation, or assign accreditation to jurisdictions with mapping limitations visit: Customize the accreditation for a session.
Passing Users for Programs Using Enroll and Pass
If you are migrating from Version 1.0, you should note one specific improvement that is implemented in Version 2.0: a single external program record can be applied to multiple professionals. This eliminates much-duplicated data entry. Once an external program record is completed, any number of users can be marked as "passed" with a simple, fast operation in the "enroll and pass" area, much as would happen with any program created in the LearnLive system.
- To understand the use of the "Enroll and Pass" area, read this article: Pass a user for a session.
- To mark users as "passed" for an external program, and to upload certificates for them, read this article: Tracking user completion of external program records.
- To assign custom credit on a per-user basis, visit: Assign custom credit to a participant for a program
- To assign partial credit on a per-user basis, visit Assign partial credit to a participant for a program
Managing Activity
Track user compliance by individual and by jurisdiction
Once you are regularly adding programs and entering credits for the compliance engine to track your professionals, you'll inevitably want to know how your users are progressing with their compliance requirements. You can view Compliance Overviews in a few different ways using our system. Each of these overviews/reports work similarly, but vary based on the report selected. Each show the user’s next requirement that has the most credit amount due within that period. The period displayed is based on the period used to determine the Current Compliance Report.
For more information visit the pages noted below.
- To get a high-level, simplified view of all your user’s overall compliance status in all jurisdictions being tracked by your company, visit: View compliance status for all users in all jurisdictions. This report only shows the user’s status as well as separate columns to show many credits they have completed overall, and how many remain, to satisfy all of the requirements for the period.
- The overview above is also available on a per-user basis. To view the overall compliance status for one user in all their jurisdictions visit: View compliance summary for a user. This report is set up the same as the one above but will only show the selected user.
- To get a detailed view of all your users compliance status in one jurisdiction, say a jurisdiction with a reporting deadline coming up, visit: View compliance status for all users in a jurisdiction. This report shows each user’s status as well as separate columns to show how many credits they have completed toward each requirement, and how many remain, to satisfy each of the requirements for the period.
- Finally, by selecting any row in these overviews you will be taken to the individual user’s detailed Compliance Report which will help you understand exactly which requirements are incomplete – or complete for that matter. For information on how to read this report visit:
Run reports on compliance
Compliance reports work a little differently from the other reports in the LearnLive system. You access them through the Compliance (or User) hub itself. Any Compliance Overview referenced above can be converted into a Microsoft Excel- compatible spreadsheet simply by clicking the Excel icon to download an Excel file from whichever page you are viewing.
Customize your company's email settings to send jurisdiction status emails
LearnLive’s ComplianceTM product allows you to generate automatic emails to your licensed professionals with compliance status updates. You can customize these emails as you see fit.
- To customize the timing of compliance deadline-related emails, see the article Edit email settings.
The two emails that relate to compliance deadlines are "Email Compliance Deadline", "Email Jurisdiction Status", and "Email Jurisdiction Incomplete". In each case you can disable the email altogether, or enable it and specify how many days before the relevant date users will receive an email (e.g. "Email Compliance Deadline" 10 days before the deadline is reached).
Generate pre-filled CPE Reporting Forms for tracked users
One of the most powerful features of the LearnLive ComplianceTM product is its ability to auto-generate pre-filled CPE Reporting Forms for several of our tracked jurisdictions. The LearnLive Compliance product will allow you to download forms for your tracked professionals. This will save you a great deal of time and effort. Simply click the button, and PDF files are automatically generated with the user's information all filled out for you; however, you should familiarize yourself with the forms themselves, if they are new to you.
- To obtain pre-filled PDF files for a user, see the article Print pre-populated CPE reporting form for a user’s jurisdiction.
- To obtain blank compliance forms, follow the instructions here: Obtain Compliance forms by jurisdiction.
Final Notes
The rules that govern CPE compliance are complex and they change constantly. LearnLive updates its system to take into account of the latest rule changes made by jurisdictional governing bodies across the US; however, there are many instances where inaccuracies may occur. LearnLive is committed to identifying these issues and notifying our customers when they occur and advising them how to work around them.
- Proposed and recently approved rule changes are listed in each regulator’s rules page and can be found here: CPE Jurisdiction rules.
- Known issues, problems, and updates with the LearnLive ComplianceTM product are listed here: Known Issues List.