Managing SOX Mandates

SOX Compliance Management

Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance Management is a board-level priority for publicly traded companies across all industries. To comply with SOX mandates, companies are establishing an internal controls framework, guided by The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO), and their external auditors, all in an effort to demonstrate effective Internal Control over Financial Reporting (ICFR). Spreadsheet-heavy processes, if unmanaged, can present significant risk and cost to SOX compliance efforts.

Apparity Impact

Apparity provides security access controls, version control, and change control across all spreadsheets and databases material to the Financial Reporting cycles. Apparity reduces the cost and effort of base-lining these financial documents and delivers the necessary rigor in the control environment to address SOX mandates, specifically Sections 404 and 302.

Case in Point, Remediating a Material Weakness or Significant Deficiency

When an organization deploys the Apparity solution to assist in the remediation of a significant deficiency or a material weakness associated with EUC applications (spreadsheets / databases etc.) the Apparity platform provides companies with the critical tools needed to ensure the problem never occurs again:

A key element of the Apparity design allows companies to track all user activity across all key financial (significant) spreadsheets and ensure that all copies, renames and moves of those files are also recorded and tracked regardless of what the files are named or where they are saved.

With Apparity companies no longer have to rely on the users to follow prescribed naming standards and rules on where to save files – Apparity knows exactly which spreadsheets to monitor.

A great example of the benefits of this approach is found in the ‘Version History Panel’ that is available in Excel for every spreadsheet that is managed by the Apparity system. Apparity Version History provides users, managers and auditors with a unique consolidated insight into every update, file name / location change and workflow event that has occurred since Apparity started tracking the spreadsheet.

In the example above we can see that the LIFO Workbook FY2017_Jan has been replaced by a Feb file. The Feb file is now marked as the latest ‘Production’ version and all the updates made to the January file as it transitioned to February have been recorded including the change reviews, approvals and final sign off.