Keeper shortens access reviews and SOC 2 by months with Vanta

The Company

One app to run your bookkeeping business

Keeper is a seed-stage company backed by Y Combinator with 20 employees. Their all-encompassing software tool is tailored for bookkeepers, enhancing their efficiency and speed in handling the month-end close process. By syncing directly to accounting software like QBO and Xero, Keeper gives bookkeepers and accountants a month-end close in one app — with tools to communicate with clients, catch coding errors, deliver management reporting, and track tasks. It also includes a custom branded portal to handle unresponsive clients that many bookkeepers often run into. 

Joshua Musler joined Keeper in early 2023 in a general operations role, playing a pivotal part in getting the company SOC 2 compliant and enforcing strong security practices. His background as a project manager equipped him with the skills to ensure compliance with access reviews and infrastructure. His day-to-day activities include checking on security tasks that need to be remediated and ensuring compliance with SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 — all within the Vanta interface.

Before Vanta, the process of staying compliant and meeting security standards for a large client was a tedious and manual process. However, with Vanta, the process has become highly manageable, reducing the time to achieve SOC 2 compliance by approximately 50 percent.

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The Solution

Streamlining access reviews and SOC 2 compliance

Conducting access reviews increases transparency into access to the technical infrastructure of the company. This involves ensuring that the right stakeholders have access and that new employees are granted the correct access. Keeper currently uses Vanta to perform access reviews on ten critical systems that hold their data.

"If not for Vanta, the manual process would have been a pain point,” says Joshua. “It would have involved collaborating with our engineers and tracking everything manually in spreadsheets, a process that would have consumed a tremendous amount of time. With Vanta, we were able to delegate the right people and integrate the necessary software, making access reviews much more manageable."

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The Impact

Time savings to refocus on growth

Using Access Reviews led to significant time savings for Keeper. Joshua estimates that Vanta has saved them an additional 40 to 80 hours, effectively shortening the access review process by months. While the company is still in its early stages and has not encountered any employees or system accounts that needed to be turned off or deprovisioned, Joshua foresees Vanta playing a larger role as the company expands.

In the future, as Keeper grows and their use of other software expands, Joshua sees greater value from Vanta in ensuring compliance. He appreciates Vanta's easy-to-follow UI and the feeling of progress when completing tasks.

"The interface and UI of Vanta is incredibly easy to follow. It's structured and formatted in a way that feels like you're going down a checklist. Seeing completion rates as you're knocking off this work and seeing the needle move is helpful in a process that can be painful," Joshua says.

For Joshua, Vanta is a solution that can  not only help those already familiar with compliance and access reviews, but also newcomers to the field. The biggest takeaway for him is that Vanta can be used even without prior experience, thanks to its versatility and user-friendly design. With the added time savings, Joshua has been able to reinvest his time into building Keeper’s go-to-market motion, helping them expand their presence in the fintech market.

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