Regardless of the size of your company every finance organization uses spreadsheets. To some degree, Accounting, Treasury, Tax, and FP&A all use spreadsheets in critical business processes. Furthermore, every organization has experienced the pain of spreadsheet errors, whether they became public or not. Putting Sarbanes-Oxley compliance aside, the core issue is preventing errors, and to a lesser extent preventing fraud in these tools that are under end user control (EUC). The high likelihood of spreadsheet error is well documented, and without spreadsheet governance, inherent risk equals residual risk.
The challenge of spreadsheet governance can seem daunting. There are so many of them, almost every employee has Excel on their desktop. It needs people and their time to perform specific tasks and that costs money. In addition, there is a cultural dynamic in that the talented, innovative employee who is driving the use of models is typically reluctant to any type of governance and views risk management as a drag on their productivity.
CIMCON Software offers solutions that automate EUC management and minimize the business and compliance risks associated with them. We can help you create and maintain an inventory of all the EUCs in your organization. We can also identify the most important files detect errors and provide a visual map of data dependencies. These features give you EUC controls that protect your most important EUCs and give you peace of mind.
CIMCON Gives You the Tools to Manage Your EUCs:
- Discover the volume and type of EUCs that exist in your organization.
- Risk assess each EUC based on configurable risk criteria.
- Create an automated inventory of all EUCs.
- View EUC lineage, data dependencies, and risk flows at the enterprise level.
- Error-check and analyze spreadsheets with complete documentation
- Implement version control and change management with cell level audit trails.
- Accelerate reviews with workflow-based file comparisons and alerts.
- Secure files to prevent unauthorized changes.
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End User Error Checking and Correction
Ultimately the line of business owns the risk, provide them with easy to use spreadsheet error detection and correcting tools
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Automate controls and policy enforcement
Systematically, consistently enforce policy with objective evidence of control effectiveness
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Maintain a critical tool and/or model inventory
Understanding what critical business processes have an EUC dependency and who is accountable for managing that risk is fundamental
E.U.C Risk Management Framework
The Business Case and Best Practices for End User Computing (EUC) Risk Management
Managing the enormous risks from End User Computing (EUC) applications is probably not on the top of the agenda for your C-suite. Nonetheless, you can be assured that they would care deeply if a material error related to EUCs were to occur or become public. It has cost a CEO their job.