Corporate compliance is a necessary part of running an accounting practice, but it’s also one of the most process heavy. Setting up companies, preparing legal documents and managing ongoing compliance often means bouncing between systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

At the heart of many of these processes is document signing – an integral part of the compliance workflow.

“Just about every single piece of corporate compliance work ends in a document that needs a signature. That’s not a coincidence, that’s the whole job,” says Annature founder and CEO Corey Cacic.

He says Annature has long seen an opportunity to simplify this process, particularly for firms using NowInfinity for corporate compliance and Annature for eSigning. In these workflows, teams can find themselves “manually shuffling documents between the two platforms – downloading from one, uploading to the other, then reversing the process once a document is signed just to update a status field”.

It’s an inefficient and cumbersome system, he says, adding: “Some firms do it anyway because Annature is that much better than the alternative. Others just give up and use Docusign and accept a broken process, because they don’t have the hours to spare.”

Catering for customer need

According to Cacic, an integrated corporate compliance workflow has been a longstanding request from Annature’s more than 1000 accounting firm customers. “We’ve heard the same thing from customers for years,” Cacic says, adding that Annature initially looked to existing solutions to address the gap, but when that didn’t materialise, “we built the whole thing ourselves”.

The resulting product is Pravo, Annature’s new corporate compliance platform, live in beta since January and now rolled out after more than 50 accounting firms tested it. Pravo brings entity establishment, legal document generation and ongoing compliance together with Annature’s existing eSigning, meaning documents can be generated, sent for signature and completed without leaving the platform.

Pravo also includes streamlined Australian Securities & Investments Commission Form 484 handling bulk changes and automated lodgement – features designed to reduce the administrative burden for firms managing large volumes of entities.

Making the move to Pravo

Annature has also developed a migration tool to help move existing corporate compliance data into Pravo, with Cacic explaining it can transfer an entire account into Pravo overnight.

“We built that specifically so there’s no excuse left not to move,” he says.

The launch represents an opportunity for Annature, to make corporate compliance more streamlined and connected – with fewer manual steps and less time spent moving information between systems.

“This is a straightforward alternative for firms,” Cacic says. “We think a lot of them will make the move.”

Find out more

Annature is a CA ANZ Member Benefits partner. To book a meeting with the corporate compliance team, click here.