Free tools · NDPA readiness
Fourteen questions. Seven of them stop a filing.
Answer honestly — nothing is sent anywhere and there is no email gate. The point is not a score. It is finding the two or three items that will hold up your annual return while there is still time to fix them.
Start the checklist7 items block the filing
The return will not go in like this
Seven of these fourteen are obligations you cannot file around — a licensed DPCO will not sign a return while any of them is open. Everything else can be fixed afterwards.
Filled · answered · Tall · blocks the filing
Before you can file
The obligations that exist whether or not anybody asks
When somebody asks
The rights people can exercise, and the clocks they start
When it goes wrong
The parts that are judged on hours rather than documents
What a checklist cannot tell you
Ticking a box is a claim. An auditor samples twelve records.
Almost every company that fails an audit could have ticked most of this page honestly, on the day they filled it in. The gap is not between having a register and not having one. It is between a register that was written once and one that is read.
A register written once is out of date within a quarter
Nine in ten we read describe a company that no longer exists. Nothing was neglected; the business simply moved and the document did not.
Provenance decides whether a figure survives
A count read from a database and a count somebody typed are not the same claim, and only one of them holds when it is sampled.
The tick you are least sure about is the one to look at
Access requests answered in full is the item most people tick optimistically, and the one an auditor tests first.
Two months of every year go to assembly
For companies that treat the return as a March event. When the registers are read continuously the pack is a by-product rather than a project.
Two more free tools, no email required
Work out what a contravention would cost against your own revenue, or see how the twenty-three frameworks map onto the work you have already done.