Certus™ Compliance

Comprehensive Corporate Governance Software for Sustainable Compliance

Certus Compliance addresses all aspects of your compliance efforts, including content, process and project workflow, enterprise risk management, communication management and documentation. Through a single, integrated corporate governance software platform, Certus Compliance ensures scalability and consistency to minimize deployment costs and enable companies to build a sustainable reporting and compliance practice that's easy to maintain.

With Certus™ Compliance you can:
Design...
Internal Controls
Evaluate...
Operational Effectiveness
Monitor...
The Progress of Your Compliance Environment
Report...
on Governance Status and Trends

As a result, the software provides management with greater visibility into control status and enterprise risk management - giving your company a single source of truth. The software also offers users the option to manage audit plans and walk-throughs, helping you to minimize total compliance costs.

Ensure on-time, accurate financial reporting

Certus Compliance provides a comprehensive, sustainable solution to support the most complex compliance activities. Certus Compliance manages the full cycle of compliance activities, from the design and documentation of internal controls to testing and remediation, assertions and auditor attestation. With Certus Compliance, you can efficiently distribute and manage responsibility for all compliance activities throughout your organization, ensuring on-time, accurate financial reporting at a lower cost. And using Certus Compliance to manage multiple compliance programs such as SOX, Basel II, Turnbull, and 8th Directive allows you to further optimize your investment.

Design and document internal controls

With Certus Compliance the design and documentation of an internal controls structure is quick, consistent, and cost-effective. Certus Compliance enables the rapid import of all existing documentation including policies, procedures and controls, plus pre-existing control frameworks. With Certus Compliance, you can use your preferred control framework, process structure and organizational model. For new documentation, Certus Compliance helps you...

  • Manage the document submission, review and approval process
  • Audit and track changes over time
  • Archive older versions of the document as evidence for future retrieval
Evaluate operational effectiveness

When conducting tests, control owners can use Certus Compliance to refer to all the documentation relevant to that control. Not only does Certus Compliance manage the communication with all compliance stakeholders, it also enables the quick surveying of process owners and other users as well as tracks all results in a single integrated database.

Identify weaknesses and kick off remediation efforts

With Certus Compliance, users can raise issues (surrounding the design or operational effectiveness of a control) and assign activities related to those issues. The assigned activities are then tracked to their completion to ensure a smooth resolution.

Monitor activities and communicate readiness to management

Certus Compliance provides a large collection of prepackaged reports and dashboards that give complete and timely visibility into the entire compliance effort. Status reports identify areas where additional effort or focus is needed, while trend reports enable the team to gauge its efforts relative to past activity. Users can easily drill down to summary reports.

Collect assertions and certifications of controls

Certus Compliance includes procedures and surveys for helping process owners assess, review, and warrant the strength of the internal controls. In turn, these procedures roll up to senior managers who can review data in Certus Compliance and certify the overall assessments as per regulation.

Prepare for outside auditors’ review

Certus Compliance keeps auditors "cost-effective" by making access and retrieval to control documentation instantaneous. It also supports auditor walk-throughs with an efficient mechanism to view, capture and publish evidence related to a walk-through.

Apply best practices across the enterprise

Certus Compliance enables you to leverage your compliance efforts to support good governance and add value across your organization. Certus Compliance is designed to serve as your standard platform for all governance and regulatory compliance activities, enabling your organization to:

  • Record and track governance-related regulations and your company’s related policies
  • Capture processes and controls in place to ensure regulatory compliance
  • Coordinate governance-related communication within and outside your organization
  • Manage and report on all compliance related activities

When you manage compliance efforts with a common methodology, you get cross-visibility to many of your operational processes. You can combine overlapping processes and apply best practices across an entire enterprise.

Use multiple compliance frameworks

Over time, the scope of your internal controls effort is likely to increase. As your organization extends coverage into challenging areas such as IT controls or risks related to outsourced services, you would need a compliance platform that can cover multiple frameworks and approaches. Mergers and acquisitions, or a potential change to your external auditor firm are other reasons why your compliance framework needs to be easily extendable.

Clients working with each of the Big 4 auditor firms — as well as other large auditor firms — have deployed Certus. The product supports every major auditor's approach with templates and services that allow for easy migration of that vendor's framework into Certus Compliance. Certus Compliance also supports other control frameworks — for example, COBIT for IT controls and country specific-regulations on financial controls such as CoCo for Canada or Turnbull for the UK.

Comprehensive Audit Trails
  • Easy access through the user interface to full audit trail information of every interaction with the system
  • Includes all Creates, Reads, Updates and Deletes
  • Full details of who made changes, when changes were made, as well as pre-change and post-change information
  • Reports can interrogate the audit trail to produce trend information
Comprehensive Reporting
  • Integrated security and data models deliver easy, but controlled access to information
  • Approximately 540 predefined, parameter-based reports, covering the entire project life cycle
  • Easily, configured Dashboard, delivers personalized view of information
  • Seamless desktop integration supports analysis
  • Drag-and-drop, ad hoc reporting support evolving requirements