Business License Management: Navigating Complexity with Confidence

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Annie: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Business License Management: Navigating Complexity with Confidence." My name is Annie Triboletti. I will be your moderator kicking things off today.

So 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: Hello.

Calla: Good morning, everyone. All right. So to kick us off, we'll start a little bit with just a snippet about CSC. Not sure if some of you are clients today or if you've heard of CSC, so a little background on us. Then we'll move into the definition or defining business licenses as we all know them. I'm sure we all kind of consider them different things. Certainly CSC has a different definition most of the time. So we'll just dive into the different types and what you can expect when we are talking about business licenses. We'll move into kind of common challenges with any kind of filing or compliance metric. There's always this little challenge or things that we experience that we can all relate to really. So we'll dive into those. And then, lastly, we'll look at how CSC might be able to help you and propel your process when it comes to licensure and putting a process in place that makes the most sense and is the most efficient for you.

Okay. So to kick us off, a little bit about CSC. As you can see, there's a lot of information here. What you really need to know is that we are the business behind business. We partner kind of every little type of stage within the compliance life cycle. We have our hands in a lot of different services where we can help your organizations from different places.

We are a trusted partner of more than 90% of the Fortune 500 companies, and we partner with a ton of law firms across the across the nation really and even operate in some other countries. We've been in business for a very, very long time, and we are here to support you. And kind of our motto throughout all of this is that we've got you. If there's help that you need somewhere in compliance, we've got you and especially in the business license sector.

So to kick us off, Arianne, I'll pass it to you, kind of thinking about defining business licenses and everything that we might see in the license space.

Arianne: All right. Well, let's get into it. Why do you need a business license? This is one of my favorite topics because the answer is there are a lot of reasons. So business licenses, really we need them to operate, and they are going to bring in compliance, credibility. They're going to affect your customers. They're going to affect your stakeholders.

But there are a couple areas we want to focus on. One is making sure that we are actually registered where we need to be. So why do we need a license? We need a license so a jurisdiction allows us to operate. That is going to ensure for different businesses different things. So, for example, if you offer services, it might be something like you need to get a license in order to submit a bid for contracting work. If you're operating in the healthcare space, you need licenses in order to operate in a regulated industry. If you're selling specific products, you need licenses to sell those specific products. So it really ensures that you are compliant with the jurisdiction.

And in many cases, a business license is sometimes just making sure that you're registered to do business, and that can be a very vague concept, the idea of doing business. What it covers will vary. So again, when we say a license might be needed because of a specific industry, we might need a license because of local requirements. We might need a license because of services we offer. And in some cases, we just need a license because a jurisdiction wants us to pay a license. That's just the reality of what we're talking about. The example that I like to give in that case is if you're doing business in a jurisdiction, even if you don't have a physical location, but you generate revenue, you have employees in a jurisdiction, again, you may need a license to do that business. So it really ensures that you are able to operate.

The consequences to not having a license are important though. We know we need a license to operate so we're within the jurisdiction's requirements. If we don't have a license, if your company is operating without a license, the impacts can range. So sometimes it's a matter of a jurisdiction sending a penalty letter letting you know that you owe licensing fees, you never registered, and sometimes those fees can be steep. So the cost is really a big financial impact. Sometimes it's just getting caught up in paying the license and getting registered. In other cases, it's a percent of your revenue per day that you are underlicensed. I've heard of clients having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get licensed in a jurisdiction.

Other reasons to be licensed and why we want to make sure it happens is we want to avoid legal issues. We want to avoid closures. We want to ensure that if a customer comes to our place of business, that we don't have a sign on the door saying we're not licensed. Or we haven't had our business shut down or a product or a service hasn't been restricted. So really the consequences to not having a license oftentimes drive us to get a license.

Now I mentioned a couple reasons why we need licenses. So this is a little bit more about not specifically why should I have a license, but what about my business could trigger a license. So we really broke it down into four categories. And this is where depending on what industry you're in on this call, and I saw you know we've got over 800 people on this call today, and the industries vary widely. So you may all have a different reason for needing licensing. And I use the word "licensing" loosely. Sometimes they're considered certifications. Sometimes they're considered registrations. Sometimes they're permits. But they all fall under that same kind of umbrella of business licensing from our perspective.

So when you look at business licensing, because you're generating revenue or have a physical location, a jurisdiction may require you to do some type of licensing in order to operate in their borders. The example I mentioned earlier of I have an employee going into a jurisdiction, they do some kind of service technician work. Let's say I'm a telecom company. I may need a license just because my telecom employee, my technician is going into a city. Even if I only have three customers in that city, I probably need a license. I may have a brick-and-mortar 10 miles away, and I need a license in that jurisdiction too. So just doing business in a jurisdiction, that sometimes means having employees in a jurisdiction, having assets in a jurisdiction, delivering into a jurisdiction can indicate that you're doing business. And it will vary on how a jurisdiction has written their licensing, how they consider doing business.

If we look back at licensing 20 years ago, doing business was usually just a brick-and-mortar. If you had a brick-and-mortar, you needed a license. That has rapidly evolved over the last 10 and 20 years, and now more jurisdictions require you to have a license to do business for revenue, for employees, for assets, etc. So again, just that basic business license can be required in a number of different cases.

Now when we move on to product-specific licensing, again, we have a lot of regulations around product-specific licensing. So do you sell furniture? Do you sell cosmetics? Do you sell pharmacy products? Do you sell liquor, tobacco, produce, nursery items? One of my favorite is bedding. Not like gambling, but bedding, like linens and towels and anything that might have to do with sheets and things like that. I once heard of a convenience store that needed to have a bedding license because they sold towels during the summer. So again, the products you sell can trigger a license. Dairy permits, egg permits. Again, you guys get the idea.

Professionals also can require a license, so what your professionals do, what the services are being offered. For example, do they offer accounting services? Do they offer real estate services, brokerage services, legal services, medical services, nursing services? All of those types of services that your professionals may be doing on your behalf oftentimes have to be licensed. Sometimes the professional needs to hold the license, like a doctor needs to have their own license, a nurse needs to have their own license. Sometimes they have to be licensed under your company. So a security guard may need to be licensed, but they're licensed under your business. So it's important to know what your employees do. Do they hold their own licensing? Are their licenses up to date? And then do you have licensing as a company because your employees are licensed? So we might need to have, for example, a skilled nursing facility would need to have a license to offer skilled nursing, and their employees also need to be licensed. We need to manage both sides of that licensing problem as a company.

And the last piece I'll mention here is services and activities. So sometimes it's just you're offering a service. We might, for example, be offering some type of service like alarm install. Again, the service itself is regulated by the jurisdiction. Many of these are regulated at the state level, but can also be required down at the city level. For example, food service right. If you've been to a restaurant, every one of those restaurants has to have a food permit. If we have any hazardous materials, if we have any kind of activities related to the service that we might be offering, there are often licenses required because of an activity occurring at a business or an activity or service that you offer.

So again, licensing can be needed at the state, the county, and the local level. And in some cases, even lower than local. Sometimes we see things like fire departments, tribal lands, school districts also sometimes can require licenses and permits.

So there's a lot going on with licensing. And the reason I like to mention all of these is that you may have a number of reasons to file, and it's important to know your business, your business activities so that you can evaluate your licensing requirements accurately.

Calla: If I could jump in, and there was a question. And I think you just touched base on it. But are we talking about just state only? Are we talking about local? Specifically calling out PA and Kentucky. And the answer is we're talking about all of those levels of government.

Arianne: All of it.

Calla: So a lot of them might even not be called a license. They could be called a tax, or they're tied to something else. So those in our world are technically considered licenses. So all of those levels of government are applicable in this case here.

Arianne: Yeah. And I mean, again, I see another question here related to professionals working in all states. The answer is there's not a one-size-fits-all. We have some states that require a license for your employees to be in their state, their county, their city. And oftentimes, we see this more often in the city level, when we're talking about the sort of doing business. They're not necessarily the professional, the product, or the service. But just a jurisdiction saying, "Hey, we know you're operating here. We want your revenue." And a lot of cases, those are really jurisdiction by jurisdiction. So every city and every county can create their own rules around what they believe doing business looks like. And so it's really important to investigate where you operate and identify if there are licenses that regulate your business.

Calla: All right. So switching gears a little bit, we've talked about what these licenses are, maybe why you might need them, why you have them. But ultimately, once you do have licenses, you know that there are challenges to managing these items, keeping up with items. So again, Arianne and I do this every day. We talk to clients that are very similar to you. And along the way we've kind of compiled this list of common challenges, things that happen or that we hear about, that you all might be able to resonate with along the way. And you can see them here on the screen.

One of the biggest problems or challenges that a lot of our clients face is just the sheer volume of these types of regulations. And it might not be that you have a lot, but you might have jurisdictions that you're just not familiar with and that changes the changes the amount of registrations that you have. You might also have multiple types of jobs within your one job. So you might be managing other areas of compliance or other types of filings, and then you pack on the licenses on top of that. But the idea behind more and more jurisdictions are imposing requirements. There are more and more just general licenses for various different things. And as you operate in a different perspective and I think maybe I'm sure we'll see some of this, but maybe you are not physically located somewhere and you have a lot of business or you generate revenue in other jurisdictions, and now these licenses are piling up and just trying to get your arms around all of the things going on can be a huge challenge.

Aside from that, we kind of focus on what's even included in these licenses. If you haven't filed certain like regulatory licenses, you probably haven't experienced this too much. But there are certain general business licenses that just require a lot of information. Maybe you need Social Security numbers. Maybe you need spousal information. Maybe you need bonds, insurance documents, or all of these things that are supporting the license itself. And you need to have a place to kind of compile that, or you just need to have access to it. So sometimes a lot of our clients will experience the fact that maybe they don't own the entity information, or maybe they don't own the bonding process, and they don't have really clear access to data that makes it simple for them to file these licenses. Or maybe they just don't have a central place for where they can get it all and again making it a little bit easier for them to file. So that becomes a huge issue bringing more people into the mix, or just even trying to figure out what you need to meet the requirements.

Aside from that, I mean, that's a direct correlation to complexity. Maybe you don't know what you need. Maybe you're not sure how to interpret the application. Or you're just not sure what levels of government are even issuing licenses based on your business activities or if the regulations change. And that, again, has changed a lot over the last even 5 years but 10 years or so. There have been a lot of regulatory changes for industries that are highly regulated. But even in the just general license space, the way that we've done business as companies has changed. So that's shifted the way requirements hit. So that complexity and trying to understand where to go, what to file, and what's included is a huge issue that we see all the time.

Aside from that, we also see this idea that there's missing expertise, or somewhere along the way this has been changing hands. I think Arianne and I say this all the time. Licensing is not always something that has a dedicated division. It's something that you've gotten the lucky task of being given, and you've taken something on along with everything else. And a lot of the times you might be picking up this task from someone else who had it and created a system, and maybe that system doesn't work for you. Or someone who had been doing it for a really long time has left, and now you're kind of coming in, and this idea of institutional knowledge, maybe that being lost. Or just coming into a position that you weren't expecting and needing to have the expertise and where to go, what to do, and how to file these items becomes challenging if you maybe don't necessarily have the time to allot to figuring that all out.

And then, lastly, this is something that Arianne touched on with the fines and penalties or maybe not being able to even conduct business, but this idea of non-compliance. If you are missing licenses, or you have forgotten about them, or you didn't know that you had them and they weren't renewed, the idea of being not in compliance is a huge risk and a challenge that pretty much everyone faces at one time or another. And just trying to figure out how to get back into compliance can also cause all the other challenges that you see on the screen. Figuring out how to do that, how complex that is, what you need, and ultimately increasing the number of filings that you have.

So if you haven't gotten the theme, all of these kind of go hand in hand. So if you're experiencing one, you're probably experiencing two, maybe three, maybe all of them. Really, what can we do as a partner for you to help with these processes? How do we make your life easier, when it comes to licensing, and create some efficiencies? Or I think there was a question about becoming a subject matter expert and understanding licensure. So how can CSC help you and your organization within the license space?

So we do have really two areas of support here. And there was a question that came through. Really what's the difference between a third party managing licenses versus a software solution? And that's really what we're going to talk about today, and that's the two facets of CSC services.

So on one end, we have what we would consider our full-service model, and that's outsourcing your licenses. So that's really when CSC is becoming that extension of your team. We're taking on the administrative work to help manage getting forms, prepping them, processing payments, curating data, a lot of hands off for you. You're able to sit back and try to just see what's happening.

On the opposite end of that, if you're not really in a position to outsource, or you like to kind of maintain a little bit more of that control and you just need to create a better system for yourself, we do have a self-managed solution called License Pro. And it's going to be that standalone technology that is really making your life more efficient with curating information and getting alerts and overall the bigger picture of your licenses.

So one CSC is managing for you. That's our full-service model. And the other model, which is going to be you're managing all the licenses, but we're giving you technology that makes it easier on you. Is there anything that you'd add to that, Arianne?

Arianne: Yeah, and I was just going to actually say I've seen a couple questions in the chat about how do you guys recommend handling licensing, and the reality is we recommend one of these two paths. So we're going to spend some time over the next few minutes talking about our recommendations and also how CSC supports these recommendations.

As Calla mentioned, being able to say, "Here, let me give it to a company that knows what they're doing. This is not my area of expertise. I am not a subject matter expert. I need somebody who is." That's a great strategy. We want you, again, to walk away with a strategy after this call. So one strategy is I'm not a subject matter expert. I don't have anybody on my team who is. Let me give it to people who are.

And the second strategy may be I have subject matter experts on my team, but we're just struggling with the volume, the data. We just don't have our arms around it. We need to get organized, but we don't know what organization looks like. Then a self-managed tool is great. So License Pro is a technology that we're going to talk about as well. It's been around for 20 years. We really specialize in helping you organize your data and manage it more effectively and automate the work that can be automated.

So these are our recommendations. We're going to jump into some more details. I'm going to hand it back to Calla and kind of go through, for her side, the outsource side of it.

Calla: Perfect. Wonderful explanation. So like we said, we have our full-service side, and again this is just really where you can lean on CSC to become that expert for your business and take on the work on your behalf. Again, whether it's you just don't have time, you're a small team, or quite frankly you just don't want to deal with it, then you have experts here within the CSC side that can help propel different stages of that process.

So really what we would be partnering together for would be renewing and managing the existing license portfolio. So again, you come to CSC, we provide dedicated support by way of an account manager and a team that is coming in to help out with all of the administrative work that becomes complex and that is confusing. And that even comes down to managing renewal frequencies and all those other things because none of these come due at the same time.

So the first thing that we do is we centralize all of your data, and we take your licenses and we make sure that you get access to those in a very clear and concise manner through what we call our Business License Portfolio Management System. And that is going to be a web-based platform that is accessible to you and your teams 24/7, anywhere you are with a secure internet connection. And it includes all of the critical data points of your licenses, any potential copies, and also just statuses. We're going to give you updates about what's happening with your licenses as we're going through that renewal process. So centralizing all of that data and making it accessible for you.

Then, because it's integrated with our technology and it's in there within the CSC realm, we are giving you top-notch security, not only for the licenses themselves and how we're storing the data, but when you have to share those things with us, because a lot of what you're sharing amongst these license filings is really secure, non-public information. So we want to give you a really safe place to share that. And through the technology, we have our data request portal, where you can start to share. We'll request information from you. You'll share it directly through the portal, making it easier for you to not only see what we're asking for, share it securely, but also help us build a knowledge base of the information so we don't have to come back to you for a ton of information all of the time. And it helps keep us all accountable because if we don't get responses, we can send auto-reminders, and we can work together as a team to make sure that we're staying on top of those renewals.

The biggest piece of this is certainly the administrative relief with the partnership. So again, what we're doing as your team member, we're tracking the expiration dates. We're understanding those jurisdictional rules because some of you might be saying, well, expiration dates, they don't always mean anything because there are different due dates, or there are grace periods, or your license expires on the end of the year and it's not due till the following March because it requires gross receipts or something. Don't worry about any of that. That's all something that we track and understand on your behalf and take the appropriate steps to manage that process without needing you in the mix.

Aside from that, we get any of the paperwork. We're tracking the portals, making sure that all of those things get updated. We're prepping the forms. And then, again, we're following up with you if there's something missing. So if there is a need for extra data, we're coming to you and saying "Well, now we're filing this license that requires a surety bond, or we need your audited financials," or something like that. So when we are asking for information, it's very clear as to what we're doing. We're adding that clarity into the process and removing that complexity.

One of the biggest things that I think a lot of our clients really appreciate is the ability for CSC to process fees on your behalf. So when the licenses are being renewed, we're just going to pay for the licenses upon filing. That way when we're going through this process, there aren't holdups. Maybe some of you need to process some purchase orders or have internal approvals before paying licenses. That kind of goes away when you're partnering with CSC because we can submit those fees on your behalf, and then we'll issue an invoice at the end of the process for a reimbursement back to CSC with no markup or tax, making it very easy. No escrow funds, upfront prepayments, things like that.

So with the renewal service, if you're thinking we don't have time, we don't have that expertise. It would be really great to have a partner that can do all this for you, that's what you'd be getting when you're looking at our outsourcing solution. So you're basically getting an employee here at CSC that's operating as an extension of your team to curate all of this information.

Aside from that, when you're enrolled in the outsourcing solution, it kind of opens up a little bit of an additional window for you within our team because we understand that the life cycle of your business is not always just, "Hey, we have these renewals, keep them active." It's growth. It's shutting down. It's moving. It's anything like that. Mergers and acquisitions all of that. So we do have this additional kind of facet of our outsourcing model, which involves researching requirements. So if you ever find yourself in a position where you're growing and you're entering into new markets, we can help you identify what different types of licenses may apply to you, based on your location and your business activities, and curate all of that from a new perspective. So as you expand, you can feel really confident that the licenses you need are identified, and then we can certainly help you file for them initially.

We have this opposite perspective where maybe you're trying to come to CSC to outsource, but you have no idea what your portfolio looks like and you just need some help to find some things. We see this a lot when you maybe inherited the license work and you're not really sure what to do with it. So CSC can take your existing operations and your business activities and do that initial assessment, just to figure out what is out there, what is required. And then we can verify whether or not the organization holds those licenses today, what the statuses are. Were they filed previously? Is anything not active? Are there gaps?

And then, the idea of the possibility of being overlicensed seems like that's what you'd love to find. We don't find it as much as we'd hope, but we do find it pretty often when it comes down to where you are located in a city or a county or something like that. So we can identify all of that as a means to help you know what you're about to outsource or what you're about to need to be worked on when it comes to those licenses.

So a lot that our team can do to help support not only your existing portfolios, but making sure that you feel supported as you grow into those new endeavors. We do have some other kind of supplementary things to help with mergers and acquisitions, shutting things down. I think I saw a question come through, which maybe we'll get to in the Q&A, about shutting down licenses and things like that. So those are all items that can be part of the outsourcing partnership that you could have within the CSC perspective.

I think now, Arianne, if you want to jump in and maybe talk about the differences and set the tone for how you, as a client, might be able to leverage License Pro and manage all this stuff internally.

Arianne: Absolutely. So when we talk about license management, as we mentioned before, we really recommend one of two strategies. One is if you don't have subject matter experts, if you have high turnover, if this is something where we literally don't have a dedicated team, outsourcing is a great option. When you do have team members who you feel confident can manage a licensing, or you may have other business reasons, like your licenses are heavily regulated, where you want to keep them in-house, we do recommend License Pro as a solution. I've heard quite a few people on the chat say, "Hey, I need to know how to organize my data. What are your recommendations on getting the data most efficiently tracked?"

So really, License Pro is our recommendation. License Pro supports clients with a number of different ways to look at compliance.

Number one we centralize all of the work into a single system and make sure that those notifications and alerts about upcoming deadlines are automated. This means rather than waiting for the jurisdiction to notify you, the system is actually going to tell you, "Hey, you have pending licenses you need to be working on," once that data is set up. This really helps to eliminate missed licenses because we can't rely on the jurisdictions to send paperwork or to send notifications reliably. If you've been in licensing, you probably know jurisdictions like to send things everywhere but where we need them sometimes.

We also are going to organize and track the activity by your locations, your service area, your employees. So we help you look at how your licensing is structured. Are your licenses typically based on a brick-and-mortar? Are your licenses based on a service area, where you have employees or assets, places where you service and distribute to, but you don't necessarily have a brick-and-mortar? We help you set up that data so that the structure makes sense, and you can continue to monitor where you operate versus where you are licensed. So again, making sure your data structure really helps to organize your compliance and helps you avoid missed filings.

We look at things like your store demographics, your employee counts, your inventory, so that not only are we tracking what licenses you have, helping you organize them, but we're also helping to centralize the data that's frequently required on licensing so that you and your team members are not spending time hunting data down to complete renewals, but you actually are automating the work to get that data collected. And we're really just getting the bills out the door.

There are a lot of tools that we're going to offer in License Pro that are really kind of unique to our product, that really, again, help to streamline the licensing work. One of them is we have renewal workflow designers. That means, again, I've talked about the fact that we have a lot of different industries on this call today. So industries in healthcare and industries in pharmacy, manufacturing, distributing, technology. We even have outsource providers on this call who do other types of outsourced work. We have technicians, construction companies.

You all have different kinds of licensing, and that means that a renewal is not one-size-fits-all. Some renewals are going to require certificates of insurance. Some renewals are going to require notaries. Some renewals are going to require officer or pharmacy information. So you can design the workflows that your business processes will support, so that each license can really have its own set of steps to ensure that, regardless of who's doing licensing, we always know what's happening.

This is also an important kind of address to one of the other questions I've heard, which is, "How do we make subject matter experts for our company?" One of them is to create standard operating procedures because we will see turnover in every role in a company. And licensing tends to have a kind of high turnover, especially if you have a high volume of licensing. So this is something where not everybody does this job forever. So you may need to set up standard operating procedures for your licensing. So even if you do have to place a new person in this position, they can hit the ground running because the rules and the workflows are already in the application.

The alerts and notifications is another huge part of our system. Again, I've seen some chat questions about, "How do I get the jurisdictions to notify me of licensing?" The answer is you can't. Jurisdictions are not required to notify you. They do need to send you the renewal so you can fill it out. But sometimes that renewal goes to the store. Sometimes it goes to a different office. Sometimes it goes via email. So it can get lost in the path, and we want to make sure that even if you don't get that documentation, that you have notification that a renewal needs to be handled. So we have those notifications not just for renewals, but for all the other work that needs to be scheduled and automated.

The custom workflows partner with the renewal workflows because these support other processes. So License Pro is really thinking not just about your renewals for licensing, but all the other work that goes along with renewals, new locations, personnel changes, or other critical business projects, like we might have quarterly reports. We might have remodels or relocations. These custom workflows manage the standard operating procedures for the other work that goes into licensing and compliance.

There are a number of automation tools in the system. We want to automate data feeds into the application. We want to automate these feeds out of the application. So things like collecting site data or personnel data, exporting payment processing, document management, email notifications, and all the things that we need to automate. Again, with technology, again, as opposed to just a spreadsheet, we get the automation in addition to the tracking. And that's the important part that helps to make the work more efficient, streamline the work so that it really makes sense to put technology in place.

We do provide a dashboard, a homepage with key indicators, and reports to make sure that when you log in, you know exactly where everything stands. Lots of visibility into what is happening in the application.

As I mentioned before, a lot of integrations to set up feeds and application integrations with things like payment processing or AP systems. You might need to feed data to work order systems, scheduling systems to make sure that the people you're tracking are licensed.

So lots of tools that are here in License Pro to support licensing. It's not just a renewal management tool, but it is a compliance tool.

So those of you on the call that have questions about License Pro, there's going to be an opportunity at the end of the call to indicate if you guys want to be contacted about License Pro or about outsourcing options. Again, these are our recommendations is to proceed with outsourcing to a subject matter expert if you're having trouble with licensing, or to implement a controlled environment that's going to automate and standardize the processes. Again, with these two tools, we really have you covered. So there's going to be that opportunity at the end of the call to kind of jump in and ask which one you are interested in.

Now I'm going to move over here to our next option, which is going to be a little bit of what Calla is going to cover. And this is why do you want to partner with us, right? We've told you what our recommendations are. What do we bring to the table in addition to these suggestions?

Calla: Yeah, absolutely. So by way of just what you feel like you should be looking for in a provider, or just an everyday kind of management, how you treat your data, CSC does have industry-leading security metrics, not only with all of our technology, whether you're outsourcing, but also when you are using License Pro. So there is never a question as to when you are using these systems, is your data secure because the answer is absolutely yes. And from a License Pro perspective, it's secure for you to add everything in there and use it as a tracking mechanism. But also, from an outsourcing perspective, we are going to have you share data with us throughout the partnership. And our information request portal is tied to our technology. It actually is our technology. So it is backed by all the same security standards that can help you feel comfortable when you're sharing those personal details with CSC because all of your information is encrypted in transit and at rest. So it's all really good things when we're thinking about keeping the information safe and secure for what we're using it for.

Aside from that, if you haven't been able to tell, all of our solutions are decreasing the administrative burden that is on your plate when it comes to license management. Again, whether you're having CSC take it on for you, you're nearly decreasing that 90% to 100% from the burden that you're taking on today. And then, even within License Pro, while you think maybe managing licenses can be laborious, when you're using the systems and using the features that Arianne just talked about, you really are able to decrease the amount of time and energy you're spending on these licenses because you're able to memorialize all of this good information that's going to propel your process in the right direction.

Aside from that, you're just getting increased transparency. So when you're outsourcing, I think one of the biggest things that I always hear and even what I say is outsourcing is hard because you just don't know what you're doing or who's doing what. So losing that transparency or that control of the process tends to be a reason why people choose not to outsource. However, when you're partnering with CSC inside our technology, we always store an order status. So when you're logged in to your account, you can visually see where we are in the process. Are we in process? Are we preparing filings? Are we getting forms? Did we ask you for information? Did we submit? Are we waiting on a jurisdiction? All of those little things and creating that transparency not only into the work, but the data because we're now storing that there, copies when applicable, application copies, and all of the critical data points within that system. And maybe that's something that you don't have today even if you are filing.

Same thing within License Pro. You're really tracking or can track everything that you could use for a license filing and your own progress. So you can move through those different stages of the filing and the workflows to make sure that you're reporting to yourself or your team where everyone is within those workflows and reaching the end goal, which is certainly submissions and staying compliant.

Aside from that, reducing the complexity. Again, whether you're having CSC do the work for you, it does become so much more less complex because we're taking on all of the complexity for you, making sure that we understand what's next, and just setting you up for success when we're asking for that information if we even need to ask for anything.

And I think one of the biggest things about License Pro is that you can use it to your advantage to make sure that you are memorializing everything that goes into these licenses. So when you go to do it next year, or you go to open a new site or something like that, you've already now created this process for yourself that makes it so much more simple, and you already know what you need to do next by the way that you're able to leverage the system if you're doing it.

So I think, overall, these are the key pieces of how can you solve these things for your process. If you're looking for better security, less administrative tasks, increased transparency, and less complexity, then you're in the right place. And whatever solution that you'd be choosing or looking into within CSC, we're going to meet all of these requirements for you as a best practice. And we hope that you see some value in these as well.