Oracle internal control software

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In order to display this website properly, please enable javascript. Download Datasheet. Ensure Consistent Data Across Documentation. Create Dynamic and Informative Reports and Dashboards. Automate the Certification Process. Discover the Details. Related Solutions. Internal Audit Management. SOX Compliance. Enterprise Risk Management. Governance Risk and Compliance. IT Risk and Compliance. ESG Reporting. Workiva gives our management team the comfort and transparency that their internal controls are in place, tested, and no material weaknesses are present for signoff.

Noodles and Company. Read Case Study. More ways to get the most from our platform. Read report. Blog Documenting Internal Control over Financial Reporting In light of recent SEC enforcement actions, critical audit matters, and the pandemic, it's clear that effective internal control over financial reporting ICFR has never been more important to get right.

Read blog. Customer Story All In: Solenis Signs on to Use Workiva Across the Enterprise Controller Jordan Brackett had an idea to use a single platform to manage global statutory reporting, tax reporting, monthly operational reporting, financial reporting, and internal controls. Read customer story. Find your next favorite thing. Browse The Marketplace. Management needs to have fail-safe, transparent processes, that are integrated across the enterprise and provide relevant data and timely information to senior executives.

Auditors and management must attest to the effectiveness of their internal controls. Corporations must set up process controls that enable regulatory compliance. To monitor effectiveness, your policies and processes must be articulated and promulgated. Though the deployment of these processes must be distributed across the firm, it is beneficial to centralize their design and establishment. Once you've identified common business requirements and processes used to meet your organization's compliance mandates, the key is to automate as many of those processes as possible to make them auditable and repeatable.

All information about processes and their associated risks and controls must be documented and easily accessible. Content and records management is another area that compliance court cases and associated electronic discovery have put under the spotlight.

Creating a culture of compliance an identified element of an effective internal control system also means that employees must be trained on the company's latest governance and compliance policies and practices. They must also be continually assessed on their understanding of those policies and practices. An enterprise wide learning architecture is critical for training employees and monitoring skills. Increased regulation has also translated into tighter deadlines for reporting.

By reducing the closing cycle as well as giving executives visibility to business events as they unfold, it makes it easier for executives to:. Centralized, low cost, error-reducing processes are a backbone to ensuring consistent, error-free data across the enterprise.

A proactive compliance program based on sustainable competencies is the best practice in dealing with corporate governance. However, the human and financial costs of responding to each regulatory challenge with unique one off solutions are simply not sustainable. Oracle delivers a complete information architecture that can support sustainable compliance by combining control based business and compliance applications, content and records management, and security technologies.

The architecture provides for complete visibility into financial results, business performance, and underlying controls. Enterprises can confidently and cost effectively comply with their compliance and governance mandates, from financial reporting regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, to industry specific mandates. The following diagram provides a high level overview of Oracle's Compliance Architecture and captures the visibility, control, and efficiency constructs discussed above.

The diagram illustrates the four layers of technology stacks:. Oracle supports this architecture with multiple components that are integrated with each other. The integration simplifies your entire information technology and security infrastructure as well as a large segment of your process efforts in the following two ways:.

Standardized information technology systems, applications, and business processes streamline much of the compliance effort. You can now maximize control through automated processes and embedded controls.

Improves compliancy and operations visibility through a single source of high quality information. You can run your entire business on a single, global data repository and have a concise and accurate picture of regulatory compliance and enterprise performance. Security and integrity of data is a top priority for executive signing officers. Fragmented systems, multiple general ledgers, and transaction system interfaces are barriers to meeting governance and compliance mandates. Standardizing on a single instance helps break down information silos by eliminating duplicate systems and application interfaces, ensuring data accuracy, reliability, and auditability.

The Oracle Database meets the need for a single source of truth through access control and authentication features required to protect data in a single, consolidated database repository. The Oracle Application Server and middleware platform is designed to leverage service-oriented and grid computing and complements the database security structure.

For example, the Oracle Database delivers advanced audit capabilities through extensible, policy-based auditing features. These features can provide data logs that are useful for analysis in a compliance investigation. Organizations can also define specific audit policies that alert administrators to misuse of legitimate data access rights and generate a record of them. While the security fundamentals of authentication, access control, and audit are built into the Oracle Database and Application Server, many organizations still struggle with distinct user and authorization repositories.

The security policy infrastructure associated with the Oracle Database and middleware platforms can be further leveraged by Oracle Identity Management. Oracle Identity Management delivers centralized, policy driven user management and security administration for distributed deployments. Compliance related tasks such as password management and enabling delegated administration are also easily facilitated. User Account Management - allows for identity creation and management services through delegated administration, user self-service, integrated workflow, and role-based access control to manage user access to applications and data.

This feature allows for the separation of duties common to many regulations today. User Authentication and Authorization - manages the authentication mechanism employed. This service utilizes authentication devices such as tokens, smartcards, and biometric devices to increase assurance that users are who they state themselves to be. Users can be provisioned directly in the Identity Management repository or synchronized with a third party repository and assigned a security clearance level.

This capability simplifies administration by providing a central, enterprise-wide repository that allows security and privacy policies to be shared. These policies authorize access to specific applications based on attributes of the user, their organization, and any other information that an administrator may wish to employ.

Access and Entitlement Reporting and Auditing - provides for aggregated audit capabilities across numerous applications with pre-built reports that offer a demonstrable means to show compliance.

Sarbanes-Oxley requires tighter deadlines and prompt disclosure. The more automated your business processes, the more reliable and timely is the data captured by those processes. The Oracle E-Business Suite is engineered to work together as an integrated system wherein you can pass information from one application to another without incurring incremental integration costs or inducing mapping error.

You can set up alerts to automate exception management and notifications. Alerts can specify database exception conditions for continuous or scheduled monitoring of all E-Business suite applications. This improves your ability to research and resolve issues on a proactive basis. The applications also offer a rich set of built-in automated internal controls that enable companies to enforce their business rules in every transaction.

Such controls can be utilized to implement and enforce policies that meet the evolving requirements of multinational regulations.

Examples include:. Cross-validation rules for journal processing to prevent inaccurate journals and entries of invalid account combinations. Controls embedded in the system make it easy for them to be integrated into the day to day activities of the firm. This helps you to ensure compliance across your global organization. Application controls are also significantly easier to test and validate than manual controls and hence reduce the scope of audit activities. Companies can use Workflow to support a wide variety of compliance mandates, designing processes that are both auditable and repeatable, while enforcing pre-set approvals and limits.

Workflows are embedded into the applications thus enabling your organization to streamline inter user approvals and information flows. You can configure these flows according to your business rules while validating the information transferred.

Such flows expedite business processes across the enterprise. Business Process Execution Language BPEL provides enterprises with an industry standard for business process orchestration and execution. By utilizing a self-service paradigm where end user requests are by and large facilitated by those same users, you can reduce administrative tasks and the time and effort involved in recording and tracking business events.

Manual processes are eliminated and bottlenecks are streamlined. Overall, extending automation to the end user via self-service increases the efficiency of your business information and raises data integrity. Within the Oracle E-Business Suite, a number of self-service applications automate and connect internal processes such as:.

Using the suite, self-service automation is also extended to customers and suppliers to interact with items such as:. Oracle self-service applications such as iSupplier Portal, Internet Expenses, and iProcurement increase the efficiency of information. These applications take advantage of embedded workflows that allow you to streamline inter-user approvals and participate in review processes. The Oracle E-Business Suite is a functionally complete suite of integrated applications.

The applications support the centralization and integration of business operations through shared service centers. We've discussed shared services and shared service centers in the Worldwide Operations chapter. An important impact of the deployment of shared service centers is that the number of control points in a process and the number of variations of a process are greatly reduced, dramatically mitigating the risk of process error.

The consolidation of data and processes in shared service centers also mitigates against the risk of error and of poor decision making. The benefits of shared services are not just for multinationals. Medium sized firms can reap benefits from their efficiencies. The Oracle E-Business Suite allows you to be both locally and corporately compliant while increasing efficiencies through shared service centers.

Examples of functional areas where shared service centers make most sense include procurement, disbursement, collections, order management, and Human Resources. Standardized business practices ensure that all parts of the organization conform to practices that are consistent with corporate objectives:.

It is advantageous for companies to standardize their business processes across organizations and geographic regions. Common process methodologies provide benefits of economies of scale and learning, control, and comparability. A good example of the move to standardization is Oracle and its subsidiaries.

When Oracle decided to move to a single instance of financial data, the company had more than 90 independent businesses around the world. Each business had different processes none of which were linked to each other. As a first step to run the enterprise as a single unit and avoid redundancy, Oracle took on the responsibility of standardizing those processes. In order to do this, the company established a fictional subsidiary called Monaco and then articulated the idealized procedures that this subsidiary deployed.

These idealized procedures were then subject to review by Oracle's European, American, and Asia Pacific management. Through those reviews, the processes were refined to a standard procedure. Though the processes have been edited and revised many times, they are now all standardized, global procedures. Consider the way an employee submits expenses and receipts for reimbursement. At Oracle, the methodologies, user interfaces, receipt submissions, and reimbursements are now the same anywhere in the world.

The employee submits the expenses electronically and sends the paper documentation to a shared service center from where treasury funds the reimbursement. In addition, we also meet unique local requirements such as recovering overseas taxes paid by American travelers. Finally, formally designed standardized reports from a central reporting organization are utilized to complete the business cycles. Oracle Internal Controls Manager is a comprehensive tool for executives, controllers, and auditors to address regulations that require organizations to maintain internal financial controls and monitor ongoing compliance.

The solution integrates with other enterprise business systems, Oracle and non-Oracle, to monitor key control points. It also includes specific audit features such as one designed expressly to look at segregation of duties. Note: The following sections provide an overview of the salient features available in Oracle Internal Controls Manager. In Release 12, Oracle Internal Controls Manager provides preventative controls such as the segregation of duties feature and a DBI dashboard for control managers.

One of the biggest challenges to compliance is identifying and defining a company's business processes, linking documentation to those processes, then identifying the risks and controls associated with those processes. Once these risks and controls are identified, regulations require testing, certification, and ongoing monitoring of the controls.

Oracle Internal Controls Manager can be used to automate and streamline all the processes associated with its internal control environment. Processes, risks, and control activities are now stored in the Oracle Internal Controls Manager risk library, enabling a firm to have a degree view of risks associated with each control activity as well as the individuals within the organization who have responsibility over that control.

The verification of business processes in an organization is a major portion of the internal audit function. These processes both manual and automated are subject to change due to a variety of reasons such as a rapidly changing environment, legislation, and changes in other processes.

Since the changes can adversely impact process risk exposure as well as the internal controls set up on the process, process changes must be subject to a review and approval mechanism. Further, the internal audit department must assess the process change to ascertain whether it introduces additional control risks.

Risks to internal controls can be captured through a review of the changes to key risks, controls, and business settings. It is therefore critical to be able to view version information and historical data for business processes. Oracle Internal Controls Manager provides a rich functionality in this domain and uses an intuitive workbench to provide features and benefits including the following:.

Processes and process revisions are created in a "Draft" status and must be approved before the process or its revision can be used in the system. Change notifications are sent to all concerned personnel for example, process owners and recipients of these notifications can review the modified processes prior to giving their approval. The application maintains a detailed revision history for all processes including non standard processes in the entity.

Auditors have the ability to view a complete audit trail of changes taking place in the organization and the risk library. Before approving a process change, you can compare the revised process with its prior version to determine whether the change is acceptable.

This comparison is crucial in determining the impact of changes and deviations on associated processes.

Through a hierarchy viewer, you can also see which associated business processes are impacted by the change. To help in making assessments, you can associate a survey written with the Oracle Scripting tool to an "Assessment" in Oracle Internal Controls Manager. Oracle Scripting is a powerful web based tool for soliciting, managing, and analyzing stakeholder feedback through surveys. In any organization, surveys created with Oracle Scripting can help in providing an effective control environment and the results can be used to make macro level risk assessments.

Oracle Scripting is comprised of several components including a Script Author and a Survey Administration console. The Script Author is used to build "survey scripts" that can be deployed throughout the enterprise.