Yes, up to a point. A spreadsheet, a calendar with reminders, or a folder in your email works well as long as your business falls under one or two regulations and the associated deadlines remain manageable. It becomes more difficult once multiple platforms, multiple deadlines, and multiple responsible parties come into play: then the tracking itself starts to cost more time than the obligation it was meant for.
The line is not about whether you are allowed to do it — you always are — but about whether the overview is still accurate. As soon as you can no longer say with certainty what is outstanding, which deadline comes first, and who at your company is responsible for it, the tracking itself has become the risk, regardless of the content of the regulations it concerns.
What self-tracking can handle well
For a single obligation with a fixed, recurring date, your own system works fine. Think of an annual inspection or a notification that comes back at a set time. As long as one person manages that overview and the consequences of a missed deadline are limited, there is no compelling reason to acquire something else for it. Many small businesses get by for years with exactly such a system, and that is in itself nothing to doubt.
Where it breaks down is with multiplication. A webshop that sells own-brand products and delivers to multiple EU countries soon has to deal with obligations that come from different angles: product safety, packaging, accessibility, personal data. Each of those subjects has its own rhythm of notifications and reassessments, and those rhythms do not align. A spreadsheet with four tabs still works, until someone forgets to update a tab.
Why the overview grows faster than the time you spend on it
The problem is usually not the first time you enter the data. That is a matter of an afternoon. The problem is the maintenance after that first time: a product change that has consequences elsewhere too, a new country where you start to deliver, an employee who leaves and was the only one who knew where the overview was. With one platform, that is manageable. With four, the chance that something falls through the cracks between two systems is no longer small.
And then there is the fact that each platform has its own way of showing deadlines: one sends an email, another only shows a status in a portal that you have to open yourself. Anyone who manually combines those is essentially doing the work that an overview system should already be doing. answer to questions about how that overview works provides a picture of what happens automatically and what does not.
What an overview layer does and does not solve
A system that brings separate platforms together does not explain regulations and does not assess whether you comply with an obligation — that remains the work of the platform itself, or of a lawyer if the question is specific to your situation. What it does do is place the status of what is outstanding at each platform side by side, so you no longer have to remember yourself where you last had to log in to check if something was pending. reglia is precisely that: a layer over the platforms of Theos Group that shows what is outstanding and which deadlines are running, without itself making any claims about the content of a regulation. which platforms come together under reglia shows which subjects this currently applies to.
Whether such an overview is necessary for your business depends on how many separate obligations you are already tracking and how many people are involved. With one regulation and one administrator, your own system is usually sufficient. With multiple regulations being followed by different people, consolidating that status becomes the part that consumes the most time — and that is precisely the part you can delegate without giving up any control over the content of your compliance dossier. what reglia does and does not do with your data explains exactly where that line is drawn.
For the content of a specific obligation — whether a deadline applies to your business, and what a missed notification means — the competent supervisory authority or a lawyer remains the right point of contact. reglia itself makes no statement on this.
Would you like to see how such an overview works in practice before you switch from your own spreadsheet? create a free account shows what is already connected and what a joint overview would display in your case.