Applications

Spreadsheet Data Security for SOX 404

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 was introduced to bring in internal controls to reduce the risks in financial reporting and fixing the responsibilities on the CEO’s and CFO’s of public companies.

Section 404 of SOX more specifically related to the reduction of risks associated with spreadsheets in financial reporting.

Boardwalk addresses the basic requirement suggested under this Act which is as follows:

1. Providing a central repository of all spreadsheets used in the financial reporting – unlike any other solution all spreadsheet data is secured with Boardwalk within the firewalls of the company in a central database.
2. Reduce manual interference as far as possible in reporting – Boardwalk can automate the repetitive data fetching and cleansing from any backend system/s, processing, transformation and reporting.
3. Provide an access control mechanism to allow authorized personnel to work on this data – Boardwalk’s access control is available not just at file level but at column, row and cell level.
4. Provide controls on the formulae and macros in the spreadsheets – formulae and macros are secured and except the admin or process owner no other user can modify the formulae, macros or the logic.
5. Provide time stamp to data changes – Boardwalk provides time stamp at cell level.
6. Provide audit trail of the changes that have taken place before arriving at the final reports – Boardwalk provides audit trail at cell level and tell who has changed the value in the cell, were earlier values, has a formula been changed in the cell and when has the change been made to the data.