How Compliance Central Helps Your CFO and CAO
October 22, 2017
Doug Sabanosh

Let’s face it, CFOs, CAOs and financial teams, in general, have a lot of responsibilities for the financial functions and health of an organization. And while the CFO and CAO roles and responsibilities vary greatly, they have a lot in common – responsibility for internal controls, financial disclosure, and watching the bottom line. But despite the critical nature of GRC and the devastating repercussions of default, 75-percent of companies admit they lack integration among their risk management processes to ensure accuracy. (Deloitte Global Risk Management Survey, 8th Edition). The major issue: rising costs and time associated with documenting, testing and reporting on internal controls and disclosures.

Organizations, these days, look to integrate GRC processes that produce more accuracy and visibility into internal controls without costing them an arm and leg. Unfortunately, last year, organizations sized $100M – $1B, spent an average of $474,000 – $1,241,000, respectively, on SOX compliance, while increasing the time spent on GRC an average of 39 – 47 percent.

Compliance Central’s customizable platform improves the life of the financial department – particularly the CFO and CAO – in a number of ways. Built on the Salesforce platform, the CompCen three-part system provides great confidence that the internal control structure is working as intended. Its Controls Manager, Reconciliation Manager, and Certification Manager integrate processes through customizable functionality and delivers more visibility through insightful reporting.

Controls Manager documents, tracks and reports on internal controls and deficiencies, thus reducing errors in the system. Additionally, Controls Manager saves time through making collaboration between stakeholders more effective. Control visibility moves stakeholders towards improving the organization’s overall control environment, while powerful reporting allows people to instantly run reports to deliver the information they need, when they need it.

Reconciliation Manager automates your financial account reconciliation process by allowing managers to define the process within the Compliance Central platform and seamlessly mandate adherence with stakeholders. The ability to collaborate on reconciliations between corporate and subsidiary locations for items such as intercompany accounts, cuts both travel time and man hours. Reconciliation Manager also includes robust reporting, with the ability to identify which reconciliations are complete versus not finished, which location, individual accountant or person is having trouble with their reconciliations, allowing for quicker training and adoption.

Certification Manager creates, distributes, approves and archives secure certifications, eliminating the need for quarterly manual surveys. Certification Manager allows managers to customize compliance questionnaires, control assessments, certifications, and automatically deliver them to everyone in the company who needs to complete them. The centralized system electronically documents the questions and answers, saving them for future reference. System reports identify who has answered the questionnaire, who has not, who has approved it, and what the answers are, allowing stakeholders to quickly pinpoint the items the disclosure committee or management needs to solve.

While saving time and cutting costs, the Compliance Central’s customizable platform offers users the ability to define processes and ensure all collaborators adhere to those processes through reporting and collaboration.