A privacy compliance checklist is only useful if it is ordered, because the items depend on each other. You cannot describe processing you have not listed, and you cannot answer a request about systems nobody has enumerated. The twelve below are in dependency order, and a company with a website, a mailing list and a handful of tools can work through them in about a week.
Items one to four: know what you hold
One, list every system that holds personal data, including the spreadsheets and the support inbox. Two, for each, write what it holds, why, who can see it and who else receives it. Three, decide a retention period per purpose and write the reason beside the number. Four, note where data leaves the country and under what arrangement. Those four are the register, and every remaining item quotes from it.
Items five to eight: say what you do
Five, write the privacy notice from the register rather than from a template. Six, put a notice at every point of collection: the forms, the checkout, the sign-up. Seven, publish the cookie inventory, counted from a clean browser rather than from the tag manager. Eight, state the retention position in the notice, as a period or as the criteria, and make it the one you actually wrote down at item three.
Items nine to twelve: be able to act
Nine, publish a route to make access, deletion and correction requests, and tell the whole team that anything resembling one is forwarded the day it arrives. Ten, write down how you verify a requester without collecting new identity documents. Eleven, check that each vendor receiving personal data has an agreement, and keep the list. Twelve, start the request record: who asked, when, what was searched, what was released or refused, and the date against the deadline.
What to review, and when
The register when a tool is added or removed, which is the event that falsifies everything downstream. The notice at least every twelve months where California's consumer privacy statute applies, and whenever the register changes. The cookie list quarterly, because tags arrive quietly. And the request record continuously, because the only number that matters there is how many were answered inside the deadline.
Questions people ask about privacy compliance checklist
Which item do most companies skip?
The first. Everything else can be drafted from a template and look finished, and all of it is wrong if the system list is incomplete.
Is this enough to be compliant?
It is enough to be in a defensible position for an ordinary small business. Special category data, children's data, health or financial services bring additional rules that need specific advice.
How long does it take?
A focused week for the first pass, most of it spent on the register and on chasing vendor agreements, which depend on other people answering.