Building a compliance calendar for a small firm

5 min read

A regulated firm of three or four people carries most of the obligations a large one does, and none of the staff. There is an annual filing after the year end, registrations to renew, training to refresh, reviews to carry out and records to keep — and almost none of it arrives with a reminder attached. It lives in a consultant's spreadsheet, or in the principal's memory, which works until a busy quarter.

Start from your year end, not from January

Several of the heaviest obligations are measured from the firm's own fiscal year end rather than the calendar year, so a template built for a December filer is simply wrong for a firm that closes in June.

Write each item with the date it is actually due for you, and the interval it repeats on. A calendar that is approximately right is one nobody trusts, and a calendar nobody trusts gets ignored.

List everything that recurs, not only what is filed

Filings are the visible part. The items that get missed are the ones with no form attached.

Annual and periodic regulatory filings and updates
Firm and individual registrations, and any renewal fees
The annual compliance review, and any periodic testing it requires
Continuing professional development hours for each registered person
Anti-money laundering, data protection and conduct training that must be refreshed
Professional indemnity cover, bonds and other insurance
Disclosure or document delivery windows with a deadline attached

Put one name against each item

Work that belongs to the firm belongs to nobody. Every item needs a person, even when the firm is small enough that the answer is usually the same person — because the point is what happens when it is not.

A manager or principal should be told when a date approaches and nothing has been recorded, rather than discovering it afterwards.

Decide what counts as evidence, before you need it

For each item, decide what you will keep to show it was done: a filing receipt, a signed review, a training certificate, a policy document with a date. Store it with the item rather than in a folder somebody has to remember the name of.

Keep completed cycles rather than overwriting them. The question at an examination is usually what was in force at a date in the past, not what is in force today.

Review it weekly, in five minutes

A short weekly look at what is due in the next thirty days catches anything the reminders missed and costs almost nothing. A summary email on a Monday does the same job without anyone remembering to log in.

What a calendar cannot do

Deciding which obligations apply to your firm, in which jurisdiction, and by when, is work for your regulator's rules and your compliance adviser. No software should tell you that, and anything that claims to is selling certainty it does not have.

What a calendar does is make sure that once an obligation is written down, with a date and an owner, it is never the thing nobody remembered.

Doing this with DeadlineDesk

Add each obligation with its own date and repeat interval, set the owner, and attach the evidence as it is produced. Reminders escalate on their own, the Monday summary lists the week, and every completed cycle stays as history with its documents, so a question about last year has an answer.

Put this into practice

Print the free renewal checklist, or try DeadlineDesk free for 7 days. No card needed.

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