Summary
A provider answers to several regulators at once, each with its own file format, its own codes, its own calendar and its own idea of what a learner record looks like. RegulatoryOS is the single spine those connections run through: one submission ledger, one deadline calendar, one exception queue, one place where the mapping between your codes and theirs is recorded.
The most important thing in this guide: in this module, submitted never means transmitted. A submission marked submitted has been prepared and released by you. Whether the regulator received, accepted or rejected it is a separate fact with its own status. Conflating the two is how a provider discovers in month three that nothing has been going anywhere.
Who This Guide Is For
- Quality officers and compliance managers
- Administrators who prepare regulatory returns
- Executives who need to know whether the provider is current
Prerequisites
- Your accreditation details captured under provider settings
- Learner and enrolment data complete enough to validate
- Credentials or scheme references for each regulator you deal with
Step 1: Set Up the Connections
Navigate to Regulatory → Connections.
A connection pairs your provider with one regulator and the connector that talks to it. Some connectors exchange files; some call an API; some are, honestly, a structured record of a manual process. The connection page tells you which, and you should know which before you rely on it.
Configuring a connection does not transmit anything. It establishes where things will go.
Note: A connector being present in the catalogue does not mean it is switched on for your provider, and some connectors are inert until a subscription key is configured by skillSYMS. The connection page shows the real state.
Step 2: Map Your Codes to Theirs
Navigate to Regulatory → QCTO (or the relevant regulator) to review the code mappings.
Every regulator has its own code sets — qualification codes, module codes, site codes, reason-for-exit codes. The mapping is what turns your data into theirs. Most rejected submissions are rejected here, and the rejection message rarely says so plainly.
Step 3: Work the Calendar, Not the Deadline
Navigate to Regulatory → Calendar.
The calendar carries each regulator’s reporting periods and deadlines as recurring instances. Work backwards from them: a submission window that opens on the first and closes on the thirtieth is not a thirty-day task, it is a thirty-day window on data that had to be right before it opened.
Step 4: Prepare and Release a Submission
Navigate to Regulatory → Submissions.
A submission is built from live data, validated against the regulator’s rules, and then released. Read the validation output before releasing. As elsewhere on the platform, errors cluster: forty errors are usually one missing field on forty learners.
After release, watch the status. Regulatory → Inbox carries what came back — acknowledgements, acceptances, rejections and queries.
Step 5: Clear the Exceptions
Navigate to Regulatory → Exceptions.
An exception is a record the regulator would not take, or took with a query. Each one is a real learner with a real problem. Clearing exceptions is the actual compliance work; producing the file is the easy part.
Step 6: Keep Accreditation Current
Navigate to Regulatory → Accreditation.
Your scopes, their expiry dates and their conditions. The platform monitors expiry and warns ahead of it. An accreditation that lapses unnoticed invalidates enrolments made after the lapse, which is expensive to unwind.
Step 7: Company Records and CIPC
Navigate to Regulatory → CIPC.
The CIPC connection is read only and each query is billed. Use it to confirm company registration details and directorship against what you have captured — not as a general-purpose lookup tool.
What Good Looks Like
- Every regulator you answer to has a connection, and you know which are live
- Code mappings are reviewed before a submission window, not during it
- The exception queue is worked down between windows, not inside them
- Accreditation expiries are more than 90 days out or have renewal work against them
Common Mistakes
- Reading
submittedasreceived. They are different facts and the module keeps them apart on purpose. - Fixing exceptions in the export instead of in the record. The next submission recreates them.
- Discovering a code mapping problem in the window. Validate a dry run a month early.