Your QSA arrives in six weeks. Your evidence spreadsheet has nine tabs and three owners, and it's already wrong.
PCI-DSS Requirement 12.4.2 mandates quarterly security reviews for service providers. Most retailers manage this in spreadsheets that are everyone's problem and nobody's priority. Pulse Compliance runs the controls continuously — so the evidence is there on the day.
The cost of not catching this.
QSA evidence-wrangling cost
A typical mid-market retailer with 20–100 stores spends 120–200 hours gathering PCI-DSS evidence per assessment cycle. At $150/hr QSA time plus internal labour, that's $25,000–$45,000 per cycle — before remediation.
Recurring non-compliances
Without continuous monitoring, the same control gaps recur cycle after cycle because the fix is applied at audit time, not embedded in operations. The QSA sees the same finding for the third year running.
Breach exposure window
A control gap that exists between assessment cycles is an attack surface you don't know about. Continuous evidence shows you which controls degraded — and when — before a breach tells you.
How Pulse catches it.
Continuous evidence collection
Pulse maps your iVend configuration to PCI-DSS requirements and collects evidence rows each audit cycle. Access control changes, patch events, and configuration drift are recorded automatically.
Control drift alerting
When a PCI control degrades — a terminal drops below patch level, a user access right changes, a batch settlement window exceeds the allowed period — Pulse fires a control-drift alert.
AI-drafted attestation summaries
"Draft me an attestation summary for Requirement 8 access controls" returns a cited-evidence summary. Your QSA gets cited data rows, not narrative.
What you'd see.
Is this your problem to solve?
Compliance owns the evidence; IT owns the controls.
What it costs.
PCI-DSS attestation support is part of Pulse Compliance. Compliance is a seat-licensed add-on alongside Pulse Infra. Standard tier covers evidence collection and drift alerting; Pro adds AI-drafted attestation summaries and inspector-ready PDF exports.
Estimate your monthly cost
Worked example — Chain M (FreshMart)
- 3 Infra Pro seats × $69 = $207
- 48 POS @ Pro band (50 × $7) = $336
- 12 Store Manager seats × $19 = $228
- 1 Compliance Standard seat (bundled with Infra) = $0
- = $771/mo USD