Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC)
Automate your control processes and compliance documentation
Documenting your processes can be time consuming and labour intensive but may still not deliver the level of continuous control and risk management that you need.
Instead of just documenting processes, you can now automate them, streamline them and build ongoing control and compliance into your day-to-day activities, as they happen!
The CODA Financials control framework offers an automated way to manage and carry out key business processes and accounting activities, making them more visible, repeatable, controlled and auditable. And – maybe best of all – your documentation is produced automatically as a natural byproduct of the process!
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What is the control framework?
Developed in close collaboration with Microsoft®, our control framework transforms documented procedures into systems that drive and protect the business. It enables you to automate & standardise key business processes, ensuring they are carried out reliably, repeatably and in ways that can be audited more easily – so that you can stop your spiraling audit costs and cut the risk of non-compliance.
What does it do?
The control framework is part of CODA Financials’ Link™ Architecture. It combines CODA’s powerful yet straightforward task-modelling engine with widely used Microsoft® Office productivity technologies, such as: Outlook® (email); and InfoPath® (forms) and, where required, SharePoint® (standard portal).This allows users to model, manage and automate key processes, allocating responsibilities, setting timescales, prompting actions and tracking changes for each task.
CODA has applied this innovative process management technology to address the specific issues around statutory and regulatory compliance. It delivers robust functionality that enables organisations to take the processes they have diligently documented, then streamline them, automate them to the maximum degree and repetitively control their compliance efforts:
- automating task assignment and management
- collating, tracking and clearly showing the owners, dependencies, timescales and progress of all tasks – via a shared web portal
- keeping all participants informed and aware of the input needed and when it is required
- creating audit trails and a document history to support compliance reporting and internal controls requirements.
The control framework in action
The software enables you to take your best practice model for any financial process and automatically generate a shared, secure in-house team site, through which the various participants can then initiate, carry out, manage and monitor the tasks involved – depending upon their particular role(s).
Through clear, controlled team-working, CODA’s specially developed task management system drives and coordinates the processes. It gives you full visibility of participants, tasks and task status (e.g. “traffic lighting” of time-critical tasks), as well as a repository for all supporting documentation. The system automatically generates electronic InfoPath® forms – both for the predictable, regular activities involved in the process and for any unexpected variances that may occur.
Intelligent integration and interaction
The control framework is a major step forward in workflow development. It enables you to specify not only the tasks but also the sequence in which they are to be carried out. The forms are automatically directed to the relevant participants and designed to assist and encourage swift, consistent, accurate completion. It can also interact with other systems. For example, you can use it to standardise the way users create accounts or post documents in your accounting application. It lets you achieve this by using the most appropriate form of integration for your systems, whether that is Web Services, XML or a specific integration tool. So, you can use it more widely and get extra value from your other business systems too.
Automated updates
As each task is completed and then approved, the relevant data is automatically fed back into the source system (where appropriate) and the team website updated accordingly. Where the task has others dependent on it, its completion also triggers the next task or tasks in the sequence and alerts the participants.
Secure, complete tracking and reporting
Once a process is complete, the site can be locked down and stored for easy URL access to a comprehensive audit history of who did what and when, with supporting documents easily viewable via simple drill-down to a task’s document library.
Read more about UNIT4 can help you with automating controls.
Further information
To discover more about the full range of ways that we can help your organisation, please:
- either read more about CODA Financials for process & control automation
- or read more on this site about our sector focus, solutions, services or company
- or contact us to discuss your requirements in more detail.