How to meet the Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) deadline with Gatekeeper

If your business has any contracts in place to transfer data outside of the European Economic Area, it needs to adopt new Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) within these agreements. Modernised clauses were published by the European Commission on June 4th 2021 and must be used when sending or receiving personal data.

Any live Data Processing Agreements that your business entered before 27th September 2021 must be amended by 27 December 2022. If this isn’t achieved, your business is at risk of transferring data to non-EU countries non-compliantly. This could result in large fines for your business.

In this article, we take a look at what your business needs to do to make these changes in time. We’ll demonstrate how Gatekeeper can help you to take control of your legacy contracts so that it can remain compliant in the future.

Meet compliance deadlines with contract management software

If your business has large volumes of live agreements that are manually managed, meeting the December 2022 deadline will be daunting. The time needed to find your agreements, locate the clauses, make the changes and then notify your third-parties may mean your business is cutting it close to the deadline.

It will likely require high levels of resources, a lot of time and may even mean taking your stakeholders away from other business-critical activities. Gatekeeper is a contract management solution that automates these types of activities, making it easier to stay on top of your portfolio and safeguard compliance. Having centralised agreements that are searchable and easily tracked is key to meeting regulatory requirements and deadlines. Let’s take a look at the features that can help.

1. Find outdated SCCs with Global Search

Expecting your legal team to spend hours re-reading existing agreements to find outdated Standard Contractual Clauses will be met with frustration. It’s also a waste of their valuable time which should be dedicated to high value activities.

Global Search functionality from Gatekeeper allows your business to search for SCCs from anywhere within the platform. You’ll be able to see the contract, the vendor it’s assigned to and the file name. It allows you to drill into the data and locate agreements that have outdated SCCs.

The search engine, powered by Optical Character Recognition, will return document coordinates so you can quickly and easily identify outdated Standard Contract Clauses. Global search saves your team hours of time and helps you to stay in control of legacy controls. Quickly find your existing Data Processing Agreements, know which ones have clauses that need your attention and update them in a timely fashion ahead of the deadline.

Easily locate the information you need the most

2. See DPAs in the contract record

Businesses manually managing contracts may keep the master record and any additional documentation in silos. If DPAs are stored separately, it makes them difficult to find and update.

Gatekeeper offers a centralised contract repository, giving your business easy access to the Master Record whilst allowing you to store information against it through the parent-child contract hierarchy. By showing DPAs in the contract record, those responsible for updating terms can do so quickly, knowing they are updating the correct version.

See DPAs in the contact record, stored in the repository

3. Use custom data to highlight old SCCs

By using Gatekeeper, your business can define custom data fields which allow you to further categorise your records. Your business can add custom fields to any DPAs and identify outdated Standard Contractual Clauses.

This custom field can be allocated specifically to contracts, as well as particular types. By creating custom data for Data Processing Agreements only, you can make them editable in the Gatekeeper repository.

Whoever has ownership of these agreements can filter the contract view by the custom data and start working through any DPAs that are marked as having outdated SCCs. This ensures greater accuracy and efficiency when updating your agreements ahead of the December deadline.

Create custom data in Gatekeeper

4. Create ‘Saved Views’ to track SCC updates

Meeting regulatory requirements, especially if you’re trying to do it within a short timeframe, can feel overwhelming if you’re juggling different projects. Perhaps you start your day updating old SCCs but get pulled into a strategy meeting. How can you keep track of your progress easily and know where to start again?

Not only does Gatekeeper allow you to configure your Contract view with the custom data mentioned above, it also allows you to save views. With the choice of two options - ‘Save New View’ or ‘Select View to Update’ - you can track your progress easily. You can also swap between previously saved views so you never lose track of which DPAs have already had their clauses updated.

Create a saved view that you can always go back to. 

5. Track Standard Contractual Clauses amendments in Workflows

Using Gatekeeper’s Kanban Workflow Engine, your business can digitise contract reviews post-signature. This is particularly helpful for any live contracts that still contain SCCs that need updating.

Initiate a review by pulling an existing contract into a workflow where you’ll be able to see key metadata of the original agreement. The Workflow Card will help you to easily identify any agreements where there is an outdated SCC, as well as notify any other stakeholders.

This visibility will give you a true snapshot of how many contracts still need amending, who is responsible for the SCC update and it will also allow you to collaborate with your third-parties who are involved with the agreement.

See the progress of your SCCs in the Kanban Workflow Engine

Wrap Up

Safeguarding compliance and meeting regulatory requirements takes ongoing work, effort and resources. However, this work doesn’t need to be arduous if you have the right systems in place.

Gatekeeper helps you to maintain compliance and easily work towards regulatory deadlines. By automating your approach to contract management, allowing you to search the contracts that need updating and giving you the opportunity to track everything, you’ll be able to stay compliant with ease.

If you want to know more about any of these features or how Gatekeeper can help you with other regulatory requirements, book a meeting today.