Simplify Sarbanes Oxley Compliance
TrackerSuite.Net offers organizations a cost-effective, easily deployed and maintained solution that facilitates compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (PDF). TrackerSuite.Net is a suite of integrated, modular applications for project management, time and expense reporting, purchasing, personnel management and business intelligence reporting. These applications work together to facilitate Sarbanes-Oxley compliance by improving the accuracy of reporting, securing financial processes, maintaining an electronic "trail of responsibility" for financial items, and simplifying fiscal reporting.
- Project Tracker.Net provides the backbone of Tracker Suite's financial reporting. Project budgets are defined in Project Tracker, and though its integration with the other TrackerSuite.Net modules, Time Tracker.Net, Expense Tracker.Net and Purchase Tracker.Net, users can charge time, expenses and purchases against projects and cost centers, for improved accuracy in billing.
- Personnel Tracker.Net profiles the roles of all the organization's employees, their spending approval levels as well as approval routing for timesheets, expense reports and purchase orders.
- Purchase Tracker.Net streamlines and secures the organization's procurement processes, providing a stable purchase to pay process for compliance with Sarbanes Oxley. Purchase Tracker provides a database for vendor information, enforces strict approval routing of submitted purchase orders with electronic signatures and logging to track activity, provides GL coding details, assists invoicing with PO number assignment and tracking and simplifies the vendor payment process.
- Time Tracker.Net and Expense Tracker.Net streamline and secure financial reporting. Users can report time and expenses through the Web or email, with line item billing to projects and cost centers. Submitted billables are automatically routed to designated approvers, with electronic signatures recording all edits and approvals.
- The Tracker Data Warehouse is a Web based reporting engine which integrates with Crystal Reports and offers drill-down capability. Using SQL Server as a back-end data store, the Tracker Data Warehouse gathers and integrates information from TrackerSuite.Net modules and legacy sources such as HR and Accounting systems. Using a report editor, organizations can generate the particular reports they need to comply with Section 404, to provide ample evidence of their fiscal responsibility. These reports are constructed with up to date data, which also simplifies compliance with Section 409 of the Sarbanes Oxley Act.
The Advantages of TrackerSuite.Net for SOX Compliance
TrackerSuite.Net offers critical advantages as a Sarbanes Oxley compliance solution, in deployment, scalability, adoption and maintenance.
One of the larger, more difficult hurdles in achieving SOX compliance is the priority assignment in instituting controls throughout the organization. A large company with geographically distributed offices is forced to review and choose those that represent the critical areas of their financial reporting, whether by themselves or in aggregate with other offices.
Because TrackerSuite.Net is 100% Web based, both deployment and scalability are non-issues. TrackerSuite.Net presents the entire organization with a single portal, accessible from any location through Microsoft Internet Explorer, whether it's an organization of 50 employees or 5000. TrackerSuite.Net also integrates with major email platforms including Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, allowing users to enter TrackerSuite.Net without ever leaving their email client. This ease of access, combined with TrackerSuite.Net's role-based user interface and straightforward functions simplify adoption.
The structure of the TrackerSuite.Net applications also simplifies maintenance as well as customization. TrackerSuite.Net is 100% SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), utilizing next generation architecture including LDAP, as well as established Web technologies including SOAP, XML and style sheets. By centralizing the control of services and eliminating the need for agents to drive processes, TrackerSuite.Net lowers IT overhead and frees resources.
An Overview of Sarbanes Oxley
The Purpose of Sarbanes Oxley
A series of accounting and securities scandals in several large corporations in early 2001 initiated the creation of the Sarbanes Oxley Act, which was passed in July 2002.
The purpose of Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) is both to enforce accurate financial reporting and to drive the development of stronger internal processes (particularly purchase to pay and controls within those organizations for the creation and management of financial records and approval procedures.
The Impact of Section 404 of Sarbanes Oxley
Section 404 of Sarbanes Oxley requires the following of the organization's management:
- That management must accept responsibility for the effectiveness of the company’s internal controls.
- That management must report an assessment of the effectiveness of the company’s internal controls at the close of each fiscal year. This report must be backed with evidence and documentation of the design of the controls.
- This assessment must be reviewed and validated by the public accounting company performing the organization's audit.
While the SEC realized that the demands of 404 would be burdensome, particularly in its first year, the consensus was that the benefits of improved reporting, as well as renewed investor confidence, would outweigh the costs involved. It was also believed that Section 404 would place a greater burden on large companies rather than mid-size or small businesses, however the opposite appears to be true.
By holding smaller organizations to the same standard as larger companies with more complex organization, the cost of Section 404 has become so prohibitive that some businesses, including Ohio Art Co., which makes Etch-A-Sketch and ShoLodge Inc., which owns and operates Shoney's Inns, have announced plans to de-register their securities and go private (Accounting Rule Exposes Problems, Stirs Debate, Post-Gazette.com). This has also moved the SEC to grant 1 year extensions to certain business for filing Section 404.
