Sarbanes
Oxley - How AutoForm LaserNet can help
International companies are facing a raft of new legislation
on how a company should report and control their corporate
finances. Laws such as Sarbanes Oxley, the International
Financial Reporting Standards and the forthcoming European
8th Directive, will all have a dramatic impact on how organisations
organise and govern their financial accounting systems.
While each piece of legislation concentrates on different
aspects of financial control, they all have the same objective:
directors and managers must constantly review and test that
their company is stringently controlling its finances and,
in a very legal sense, executives must accept personal responsibility
for the accuracy of their accounts. For instance, the Sarbanes-Oxley
act imposes personal fines of up to $5 million or 20 years
in prison for CEO/CFO false certification.
The aim is to ensure that financial reports are based on
valid and accurate information and to eradicate potential
error or fraudulent action. While most companies already
take great strains to do this, in the future companies will
be required to maintain an audit trail to prove this has
been done, supported by detailed document records.
ERP Integrated Output & Document Management
The leading Output & Document Management solution AutoFORM
LaserNet from EFS Technology provides an answer to the Sarbanes-Oxley
challenge by implementing a flexible yet sophisticated standard
business solution for managing document output, workflows,
archiving and enforcement of business rules. The AutoForm
LaserNet solution is seamlessly integrated with your existing
systems infrastructure providing a central point of document
management and thereby ensuring a high degree of consistency
and transparency in the corporate control of the information
workflow. AutoForm LaserNet ensures a complete and searchable
document transaction history for easy retrieval of information
regarding previous financial transactions. Furthermore AutoForm
LaserNet has a centralized document archiving feature that
can be accessed from a web-browser and directly from many
leading ERP and financial IT-applications.
Automated document distribution & disclosure
With AutoForm LaserNet organizations can easily implement
workflow routines for securing timely distribution of documents
to all relevant recipients. The output management module
enables printing to a wide variety of formats such as PCL,
PDF, XML, ebXML etc. and distribution via email, fax, paper
and/or storage in an archive. This flexibility provides
the required basis for establishing a solid workflow system
that can assure the timely delivery of all business documents
to any relevant party e.g. for obtaining approvals or just
to ensure that the party is kept informed. This facility
is also extremely useful for automatically creating disclosure
or statutory notices, in either email, fax or laser print
format.
Raises alerts whenever a significant event requires
action
The strong AutoForm LaserNet workflow features managing
distribution of output via all available channels can be
enhanced with implementation of automated business rules.
Business rules can be used to monitor the document content,
set flags and raise alerts whenever a situation occurs that
requires an action. Business rules can be defined to look
for significant amounts, discrepancies, possible fraud and
a multitude of other situations. Whenever such a situation
occurs AutoForm LaserNet will perform such actions as database
logging, email alerts, SMS messages or any other action
as defined by the organization.
Links documents with transaction records
AutoFORM PDM helps you to keep an ordered record of the
documents that you have used to create financial reports,
with a suite of document management & imaging solutions,
that help you to capture and more importantly create a processing
audit trail for any type of document, from any source.
- AutoFORM Document Imaging: AutoFORM
captures documents from scanners and PC files and uses
data from your ERP and ancillary IT applications to index
and automatically distribute the document to the appropriate
person, department, or approval chain.
- AutoFORM Cold Archive: Automatically
stores large volumes of outgoing & incoming documents,
letters, e-mails, & faxes as they are generated or
received. AutoFORM uses precisely the same document indices
as your IT application to assist the speed of search &
retrieval. In addition documents can be linked to many
ERP, CRM and finance screens, to provide ‘drill-down’
document access.
- Online Approval & Authorisation:
AutoFORM controls and automates authorisation process
for supplier invoices, purchase orders and other similar
documents: embedding your controls of who can authorise
what and to what level, while making a permanent archive
copy & audit trail of each stage of the authorisation
process.
- Automated Statutory Notices or Disclosure:
SOX and other financial regulations such as the Financial
Standards Authority often require you to demonstrate that
essential notices, information, or disclosure is sent
prior to contract or with the goods and service. Similarly,
most companies will need to create a daily record of currency
exchanges. AutoFORM ensures that these documents are automatically
generated, delivered and electronically archived with
a comprehensive audit trail, ensuring that legal requirements
are always complied with.
- Links documents to transaction records:
AutoFORM links documents to ERP and finance screens, while
also making them accessible from web browsers. This improves
the visibility of document information so that errors
or fraud can be more easily identified and problems can
be resolved before they become business risks.
- Tamper Proof Records: AutoFORM has
a host of facilities to control or record document deletions,
so that you keep the documents that you need – and equally
important cull those that you don’t need. AutoFORM meets
international standards for document record management.
In particular, the EU electronic signature 1999/93/EC
document authentication regulations.
The Business Value of Corporate Governance with
AutoFORM LaserNet
Using AutoFORM LaserNet to address Sarbanes Oxley issues
will bring you a number of business advantages:
- Implement solutions quickly—within
a week—without disrupting your organisation or making
changes to your IT-applications.
- Increased productivity by enabling
speedier business processing and easy information retrieval.
- Increases visibility of key documents,
e.g. supplier invoices: helps to prevent errors and fraud.
- Reduces the time & cost of distributing
documents by arranging for them to automatically
delivered by email, fax or xml, in addition to network
printers. Automatically routes documents for authorisation
or checking, such as supplier invoices & purchase
orders.
- Raises alerts whenever a situation
requires action: for example a missing Proof of Delivery.
- Satisfy customers and suppliers needs
for receiving & delivering documents in any kind of
format and via any electronic channel so that they can
meet their own Sarbanes Oxley requirements.
- Cuts the Sarbanes Oxley compliance headcount,
costs and timelines. AutoFORM LaserNet uses simple windows
interfaces allowing many implementation tasks can be completed
by individual departments, who already know your systems,
without extensive IT-support.
Click here for the complete whitepaper
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