Spreadsheet Remediation Software 1753



  • In order to address the spreadsheet compliance issues mandated by SOX, our company is currently looking at vendors who offer a software based solution to control and track changes within our Excel spreadsheet environment. The idea being that all of your ‘critical’ spreadsheets are ‘locked down’ in a central repository and ‘checked out’ for use. All changes to the spreadsheets are logged, reviewed and approved prior to being saved. This review maintains the integrity of your spreadsheets and the logging provides an audit trail of the changes.
    Has anyone else implemented or investigated the use of this type of software, and if so, I’d be interested in your thoughts on such? I would also be interested in what software you may have found available from different vendors. From my initial inquiry, I haven’t been able to locate many options for this type of software.
    Thanks for any information you may have.



  • My company recently has taken the following steps to control and test spreadsheets.

    1. We inventoried all critical spreadsheets company-wide and had them moved to shared folders on the network so that Internal Audit could have read-only access to them.
    2. We test access by running Bindview reports. I’m a financial auditor and I’m not very familiar with Bindview except that the reports show any users with access and what access they have.
    3. We recently purchased Exchecker software. It is an application designed to ease in testing of spreadsheets for errors, changes, etc. We are still becoming familiar with the application, but so far it has decreased the time it takes to do our testing of spreadsheets (which includes input and logic testing) considerably. Some interesting and useful features it has are: the ability to trace cell precedents (this is extremely helpful for input testing), Form audits (certain required characteristics of spreadsheets are input into a template and any parts of a spreadsheet not in compliance with the template are logged in a report…this is especially useful for creating a company-wide standard such as ‘all input cells must use blue font to be easily located’.
      I would definitely recommend Exchecker as a spreadsheet tool…and I don’t work for them.
      Hope I helped.
      Jason

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