SOX Compliance

The main objective of a SOX audit is to ensure that a company’s financial statements are accurate and give a complete and true reflection of its activities and performance.

The review of internal controls forms an important part of this audit process.  The auditors need to test your Access Management and Segregation of Duties (SoD) controls, for example, to assess whether they adequately prevent errors and fraudulent activity that could jeopardize your business, as well as the accuracy of your reports.

But implementing reliable controls in ERP systems can be very challenging.  Proving their effectiveness is even more difficult, especially if the auditors uncover SoD conflicts which aren’t even on your radar, or if you can’t easily provide answers to the questions they ask.

With no native ERP tools to help, many companies try to use SQL reporting and spreadsheets to do the job, but often find that it takes an inordinate amount of time, yet yields unsatisfactory results.  ERP systems give us many ways to access applications, so implementing reliable access and SoD controls is hugely complex.

Specialized tools greatly reduce the complexity, making it possible to achieve more effective controls with a lot less effort.  They also make it much quicker and easier to produce answers to your auditors’ questions, resulting in better audit outcomes.

And it’s not just a short-term win.  Our customers say that once they’ve proved that their controls work, future audits are much more straightforward.  In most cases, auditors only need to re-test controls if they know that major changes have occurred since the last audit.