Any User. Any Data. Any Deployment.
Actuate for:
Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is about building trust, and companies that
consistently disclose timely and accurate financial reports earn the market’s trust
and investment dollars.
With Actuate-built Enterprise Reporting Applications, IT professionals can automate
best practices for complying with Sarbanes-Oxley, accelerate closing cycles, distribute
accountability and provide key performance indicators—thereby improving internal
controls across the enterprise.
Enterprise
Solutions
Enterprise Solutions: Actuate for Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance
The Goal of
Sarbanes‑Oxley:
Building Trust
The Role of IT
in Sarbanes‑Oxley
Compliance
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a complicated set of
guidelines with a simple goal: to stabilize and
ensure future investment by building trust among
regulators, customers and shareholders in the
accuracy of financial statements. The Act requires
organizations to issue more detailed and timely
reports that provide a complete picture to external
stakeholders. Information that was once guarded and
used solely for internal decision making must now be
made available to everyone.
While few of the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act
directly affect technology groups, IT professionals can
automate internal control processes to help ensure
their companies’ compliance with a number of the
Act’s requirements.
Trust Builds with Accuracy
and Repetition
To reaffirm and build trust among stakeholders,
organizations must publish accurate financial reports
in a timely fashion, over and over again. To achieve
such consistency, firms must architect repeatable­,
and ultimately automated, processes such as webbased internal reviews that enable employees across
the enterprise to verify the validity of financial
information. Moreover, management can ensure
that required checks and balances are in full effect,
significantly reducing the risks of financial disclosures
being wrong or late.
By providing full, role-based access to financial
information, an IT organization can take a leadership
position in creating standards for data retrieval, usage
and review throughout the enterprise. This secure,
controlled access provides a basis for automating
the financial review process, minimizing error-prone
manual processes and solidifying the effectiveness of
internal controls.
Internal Controls Are
Compliance Cornerstones
Internal controls are measures intended to minimize
the risk of overstating revenue or understating
expenses. They provide the means to “safeguard the
reasonable assurance to properly record transactions”
and report on them. Many companies are focusing
on the end result of their compliance efforts: reports,
disclosures and process documentation. Smart
companies are thinking strategically about the
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Enterprise Solutions: Actuate for Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance
best practices that can be put in place at a more
fundamental level, by building custom internal
control applications that lay the foundation for
repeatable and consistent fiscal reporting.
To drive Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, organizations
can create internal controls that:
• Address Section 302, disclosure controls and procedures
• Provide a basis for external auditor attestation and
annual review under Section 404
• Help immediately identify material events under
Section 409
• Facilitate faster close processes under SEC rule
making on accelerated reporting
“Because the processes and internal controls are
implemented principally in IT systems, audits
involve a detailed assessment of these systems.”
—Gartner
Compliance Requires
a Custom Approach
Internal controls are unique to each organization.
While processes for checks and balances can be similar,
financial data sources are diverse, and packaged
applications simply don’t have the flexibility to allow a
usable and unified presentation of data to anyone at
any time from an unlimited number of sources.
Using Actuate to Build
Compliance Enterprise
Reporting Applications
Using Actuate, customers build Enterprise Reporting
Applications that automate and enforce compliance
processes. Enterprise Reporting Applications provide
custom, intuitive, self-service access to enterprise
data for large numbers of users. They consolidate
data from disparate sources to provide a single
version of the truth, personalize this information
for individual users or groups and deliver it on a
scheduled or real-time basis, often through a portal.
Enterprise Reporting Applications contain business
intelligence components, such as spreadsheets,
ad hoc queries, analytics, interactive web reports,
printed reports and dashboards, all delivered through
Automated internal controls drive
timely and accurate reporting compliance
an integrated user interface. They can be internal to
the enterprise, such as financial period-end close,
cost and expense accounting and sales management
reporting, or customer- and partner-facing, such as
online bill presentment and account statements.
Actuate Enterprise
Reporting Applications
for Sarbanes-Oxley
Compliance
IT organizations can use Actuate to automate
compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley Sections 302, 404
and 409, and other regulatory requirements.
Section 302: Corporate Responsibility
for Financial Reports
The CEO and CFO of publicly traded companies must
certify that:
• Their SEC reports have been reviewed and all
statements are true, with no material facts omitted
• Reports fairly represent financial positions
• They have evaluated the effectiveness of controls and
procedures within 90 days of filing
• All deficiencies, fraud and material weaknesses of
controls have been disclosed to auditors
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Enterprise Solutions: Actuate for Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance
Actuate delivers compliance information via
dashboards that:
Actuate delivers information about material events
and their effects in proactive reports that:
• Empower executives to monitor and review
approval processes
• Include information about the sources of data
• Enable drill-down from summaries to
detailed information
• Send alerts when deviations occur in
control processes
• Provide sign-off data about who has reviewed and
approved which portions of reports and when they
did so
• Aggregate and display financial and non-financial
events via personalized, KPI‑driven dashboards
• Include embedded calculations that determine
financial impacts
• Perform “what‑if” calculations as a part of
spreadsheets and complete analytical tools
• Provide information to facilitate disclosure decisions
delivered through self-service portals
Section 404: Management Assessment
of Internal Controls
Firms must meet new SEC mandates to:
Reporting companies must assess controls and:
• Assure that annual reports include internal control
reports as proof of safeguards
• Issue annual assessments of internal control efficacy
in accordance with GAAP
• Obtain and publish external auditor attestation
Actuate delivers self-service, internal control
information through portals that:
• Make report reviewers self-sufficient
• Deliver a single version of the truth by giving IT secure
control over how data is stored, accessed and used
• Provide data consistency at all levels via single
reports that aggregate data from financial and
operational systems
• Include sign-off data about who has reviewed and
approved which portions of the report and when they
did so
Section 409: Real-Time Disclosures
of Material Events
In a timely manner, companies:
• Must publicly disclose material changes in “financial
condition or operations…on a rapid and current basis”
• May include “trend and qualitative information and
graphic presentations”
• Must disclose significant events such as product slips,
loss of suppliers and changes in state health care
benefit laws
Accelerated Close: SEC Acceleration
of Periodic Reporting Filing Dates
• Publish annual reports within 60—instead
of 90—days
• Publish quarterly reports within 35—instead
of 45—days
• Disclose material changes in a “rapid and
current” fashion
Actuate delivers information to streamline closes
through role-based web reports that:
• Provide self-serve access to information via the web
• Integrate reconciled data from financial and
operational systems
• Validate against transactional systems with real-time
data access
• Consolidate many batch reports into single reports
secured at the page level
It’s Time to Actuate
Contact us today to find out how you can use the
power of Actuate Enterprise Reporting Applications
to ensure the compliance of your organization
with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and other
regulations, moving forward.
Contact Actuate
Tel: (888) 422-8828
Email: compliance@actuate.com
Actuate Corporation
2207 Bridgepointe Parkway
Suite 500
San Mateo, CA 94404
Tel: (888) 422-8828
Web: http://www.actuate.com
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