ClusterSeven Facilitates Transparency and Control of Spreadsheets to Streamline Audit Processes

Inventory Management System enhanced with exceptional workflow, user-based views and linked applications capability for critical spreadsheet and EUC management

ClusterSeven, the leading global supplier of strategic spreadsheet and end-user computing (EUC) management software, has enhanced the functionality of its Inventory Management System (IMS) to facilitate transparency and control of the critical spreadsheet landscape in financial institutions. This will greatly aid organisations and their internal audit teams in particular, in establishing an inventory of spreadsheets for review and compliance processes.

Every business unit can now have a single inventory of all the critical spreadsheets, fully attested by users and managers, based on their organization’s EUC usage policies and regulatory requirements. For audit teams, this means that they can routinely and easily review the evidencable audit trails provided by the relevant departments and business units for internal and external financial and regulatory reporting, including for SOX, GDPR, MIFID II, BCBS 239 and Solvency II.

“Faced with regulatory pressures, and aided predominantly by time consuming and error-prone manual processes, organisations are struggling to confidently withstand the scrutiny of both internal and external audit reviews,” commented Henry Umney, CEO of ClusterSeven. “This is also posing significant operational and regulatory risks to organisations. Driven by customer demand, we have added built-in automation and interactive capabilities in IMS to enable business units and audit teams to take a best practice approach to monitoring and managing their critical spreadsheets.”

The automation capability delivered by IMS delivers tangible business efficiency gains to organisations in managing an inventory of spreadsheets for audit and compliance purposes. The new visual-based workflow capability in IMS enables business units to automate, streamline and manage spreadsheet and EUC-related processes like registration, approval, re-certification and decommissioning of files. For ease of use, teams can configure the solution’s interface to meet the specific needs of users or roles, individual departments and the business as a whole.

IMS now provides teams with a complete visibility of the inter-linkages across the spreadsheet and EUC landscape. Users assign relationships between spreadsheets and other applications in the IMS inventory, to gain a well-defined map of the linked applications as well as of the underlying data lineage across the EUC environment. For example, managers / users can have visibility of the links and data flows between the spreadsheet applications and other business systems (such as SAP) that feed information into or are dependent on them across the organisation. With this insight, audit teams are able to precisely identify and manage their critical spreadsheets and be completely confident of the accuracy of their reporting.

ClusterSeven IMS is a user-friendly and highly scalable solution that enables organizations to easily create and maintain a centralised inventory of all of their EUC applications including spreadsheets, and other types of files such as MS Access databases, Business Objects and MatLab scripts. It is widely used as a cost-effective solution for centrally managing EUC inventories, providing transparency and governance.