Digital Incentive Rewards Make It Easy to Comply With Regulations and Audits

Tracking and reporting are always a key part of incentive rewards for surveys and research, but in certain industries, like pharmaceutical and health care, it takes on an even more important role. Researchers in these fields have a higher burden of recordkeeping, and complying with all the relevant regulations and audits can pose a challenge.

In such cases, your tracking must go well beyond your budget and your available rewards. You often also need to keep thorough records of other aspects of your incentives, including:

• Who they were paid out to.
• What the purpose of the incentive was.
• When the incentive was collected.
• How much was paid out in a year, overall and to each recipient.

Manual management of incentive rewards is the enemy of accurate tracking and reporting. When your data consists of multiple spreadsheets and email threads, the probability of errors or out-of-date information skyrockets. And when it comes to audits and compliance, those insufficient records can lead to big issues later on.

READ MORE: 3 Things to Consider With Incentives Management for Clinical Studies

Automatic Tracking to the Rescue

When you move to digital incentive rewards (if you haven’t already), it opens up a much more streamlined way of managing and tracking. In fact, you can implement an integrated rewards management system to make much of this process automatic.

An incentive management system has many advantages to help you comply with all necessary regulations and to keep accurate records for any future audits. These include:

• Full visibility at every level of your incentives. You can monitor rewards from an overall program level, by campaign, and all the way down to individual deliveries and recipients. See how many rewards were sent and claimed, when, and by whom.
• Two-way data sync with your survey platform. With an integrated solution like BHN Rewards, you can connect it directly with your research platform. That way, the respondent and incentives data flows between the two tools, allowing you to get the complete picture in one place.
• Self-service reports that are easy to generate with a few clicks. When you do have to report on your incentive rewards for an audit, it’s simple to pull that data. Choose a rewards management tool that offers robust reporting capabilities so you never have to manually fill out a spreadsheet again.

Benefits for Internal Monitoring Among Multiple Teams

Accurate tracking isn’t just important for researchers in industries with strict regulations. Having the right incentives data is also key for your organization internally. This is especially true when you have multiple projects and teams using rewards, as may be the case at a market research firm with many clients, a university with studies that span across departments, or a company with an in-house UX research team covering several products or services. 

By using digital rewards distributed through the right management platform, it’s easy to allow multiple users and teams to access the incentives and related data they need, but you also need the ability to set guardrails. For instance:

• User roles. In a large research agency or company, there may be many people who need to touch or track incentives, and by managing their user roles within your rewards platform, you can set limits for each team member. A research team lead may need to set up entire campaigns and budgets, while a junior-level employee should only be able to view and approve individual rewards for participants.
• Budget groups. You may also need to set budget limits for different kinds of users, based on their role or the project they’re working on. This also allows you to see how the budget was spent by each group and where more incentives funds may be required.
• Multiple funding sources. You often have separate budgets for separate projects or clients, so you need to fund the incentives from multiple sources. Letting each business unit use their own account or credit card means there’s less concern about one project using budget allotted for a different one.

With the flexibility to set these controls, you can better manage your incentive rewards and more easily separate your reporting for end-of-year reviews and budgeting.

The Right Tools to Manage Incentive Rewards

The advantages of using digital research incentives over cash, checks, or physical gift cards aren’t difficult to see, but if you’re still managing those incentives manually, it might not make compliance with regulations and audits any easier. When you add in the streamlined tools of a rewards management platform, though, your tracking and reporting becomes easy and automatic.

Find out more about BHN Rewards’ robust tracking and reporting capabilities in our Product Tour!

about the author

Hannah Prince

Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.

Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.