The Best SOX Compliance Software & Tools

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) is a set of financial reporting obligations for publicly traded companies that operate in the United States. This Act was enacted to prevent accounting failures and the resulting loss of confidence of the American public in securities markets. Implemented in 2002, the SOX Act aims to prevent the accounting frauds that were reported across companies like Enron and Tyco. This regulation protects shareholders by providing them with accurate and transparent financial information, so they can make informed investing choices.

SOX has 11 provisions that must be complied with by all public trading companies listed or operating in the United States. Some provisions apply to privately held companies and non-profit organizations.

Here are the ten best SOX compliance software available today:

1. Vanta A specialized tool offering frameworks for regulations like SOX, GDPR, and more. It supports the evolving privacy and security needs of organizations, regardless of their size and industry.
2. Mitratech An advanced framework for automating the tasks involved in SOX compliance and reducing the risks of violation and non-compliance.
3. Pathlock An automated solution that ensures your internal controls are SOX-compliant.
4. Onspring A cloud-based solution that manages issue identification, resolution, and reporting across different contexts and frameworks, including SOX.
5. Protecht Group An action-oriented platform that assesses potential risks and provides visibility into them for effective and speedy remediation.
6. SolarWinds Security Event Manager A centralized log management tool that improves cybersecurity and demonstrates SOX compliance.
7. Diligent ControlsBond An internal controls management software that simplifies SOX compliance through automation.
8. LogicManager A financial reporting tool that audits your processes and workflows to align your business goals with SOX compliance requirements.
9. Workiva A specialized SOX-compliant software that streamlines every aspect of your operation to align it with compliance requirements.
10. Netwrix Auditor An advanced solution that helps your organization establish the controls required for SOX compliance.

Complying with SOX rules is not easy as it requires organizations to establish new internal controls, perform more audits of financial information, report material changes to the public, and create an annual statement. To help meet these regulations, organizations turn to auditors and compliance platforms that can automate the required processes and workflows.

Our Methodology

We evaluated different SOX compliance tools against the below criteria to come up with our top ten list:

• Ability to restrict access to sensitive information.
• Effective tracking, auditing, and documentation.
• Process for disclosing security incidents.
• Effective reporting of financial items.

The Best SOX Compliance Software

Let’s now take a detailed look at the best tools for SOX compliance.

1. Vanta

Vanta is a comprehensive compliance platform that helps organizations meet SOX regulations. The advantage of Vanta is that it is extensive and you don’t need multiple tools to manage compliance. Furthermore, its custom-built frameworks are easily customizable to meet your organization’s specific needs.

Source: Vanta

Let’s see how Vanta’s features help SOX compliance.

Managing Controls

As internal controls are one of the pillars of SOX compliance, Vanta focuses extensively on creating and maintaining them. Its simple user interface enables you to create documented controls and monitor their progress.

Centralized Location

Vanta provides a centralized location to store and retrieve data. It acts as a single source of truth for all your teams and helps your organization to ensure transparent reporting, as per SOX regulations.

Compliance Automation

Vanta automates the execution of technical tests and document requests to reduce the human errors associated with these processes. It also speeds up the time of execution, thereby improving your overall operational efficiency.

Overall, Vanta streamlines SOX compliance with its automation and management capabilities. Moreover, it integrates with third-party tools to ensure the compliance of your entire environment. Plus, its many templates and out-of-the-box reports reduce the time and effort required for compliance.

2. Mitratech

Data governance is one of the core aspects of SOX compliance, and well-established internal controls help your top executives add evidence behind every entry in their reports. Mitratech offers advanced automation features that ensure the accuracy of reports without straining your existing resources.

Source: Mitratech

Below is a look into Mitratech’s features that help with SOX compliance.

Policy Management

Mitratech’s PolicyHub is a centralized location for creating, approving, and communicating your organization’s policies. This hub acts as a single source of truth and ensures clear communication and information dissemination across the entire organization. Moreover, it also saves time and improves efficiency.

Compliance and Obligations Management (CMO)

Mitratech’s CMO is a simple user interface that provides complete visibility into your audits. With this information, your executives can take a proactive approach to identifying and handling incidents like non-compliance. Moreover, you can use this information to understand your obligations and continuously improve compliance levels.

Shadow IT Management

Shadow IT refers to the use of unauthorized applications within your organization. As these apps are not authorized, they are not monitored and updated either. As a result, these apps can be potential vulnerabilities for cyberattacks. Mitratech’s ClusterSeven proactively discovers, monitors, and reviews agreements and helps take action against the use of shadow IT by third-party providers.

In all, Mitratech’s features provide the transparency that the management and auditors need to ensure SOX compliance.

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3. Pathlock

Pathlock is a unified platform to streamline access controls and automate audit compliance and security. From a SOX compliance perspective, Pathlock provides visibility into your internal controls. More importantly, it helps your CEOs and CFOs create reports and submit proof of compliance.

Source: Pathlock

Read on to learn Pathlock’s specific features that ensure SOX compliance.

Monitoring of Internal Controls

With an ever-growing and complex tech stack, monitoring internal controls can get tricky. Pathlock streamlines this process by providing a convenient interface that displays all the internal control violations across different applications and environments. You can also see information like the origin of the problem and the business processes that caused it. With such information, your organization can better address the violation.

Automated Actions

Pathlock’s automated processes enable you to detect suspicious activities and take action like blocking transactions, sending alerts, and ending unwanted sessions. Moreover, it also tracks and logs the behavior, which can come in handy for meeting SOX requirements.

Data Security

SOX requires you to create and maintain a data security policy that will streamline access to sensitive resources. Pathlock supports this requirement by storing all financial information in a single location and controlling those who can access it.

With such features, Pathlock takes your organization closer to SOX compliance.

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4. Onspring

Onspring is a cloud-based solution that provides insights into third-party risk. In particular, it takes a risk-based approach to identify and address the current and emerging risks in real-time. Based on this information, you can address them right away and ensure SOX compliance.

Source: Onspring

Let’s understand the specific Onspring features that support SOX compliance.

Consolidated Internal Audit

Onspring offers repeatable workflows that can consolidate internal processes and audit their compliance with SOX. It also provides visibility to teams on the different processes, as this can help them to remediate non-compliance aspects quickly. Moreover, it builds reliable audit trails to support reporting.

Streamlined Data Collection and Tracking

Another advantage of Onspring is that it takes a collaborative and streamlined approach to reporting and gathering evidence. It tracks the findings and maps them to the respective controls and policies of your organization. Also, it performs internal and external surveys and correlates this data to provide a larger picture.

Granular Visibility

Onspring offers users granular visibility to understand every data point and take the necessary action on each. Specifically, this platform connects every data point with work papers, plans, auditable entries, and other findings.

Additionally, Onspring offers intuitive dashboards, interactive reports, and access control to make it easy for your organization to comply with SOX.

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5. Protecht Group

Protecht Group is a compliance management platform that assesses your organization’s activities in the context of SOX compliance and provides insights on how you can remediate them. Along with comprehensive insights, it also boosts collaboration and drives engagement towards compliance.

Source: Protecht Group

Here are Protecht Group’s features that can help with SOX compliance.

In-depth Visibility

One of the highlights of Protecht Group is its shared view of compliance that helps to meet regulatory obligations related to SOX compliance. This shared view is managed with user access control and backed with logging and auditing. As a result, you can get in-depth visibility into user activities and their impact on compliance.

Centralized Repository

It dynamically links data across risks, obligations, controls, and incidents. Moreover, it also consolidates compliance questions and attestations to create a single source of truth. Accessing the required data when needed for establishing evidence is also straightforward.

Action-oriented Insights

Protecht offers action-oriented insights in real-time to help your executive make appropriate decisions and back them with data evidence. It can also meet the reporting requirements of SOX compliance. At any time, authorized users can even create custom visualizations to help understand the reason for specific actions.

Overall, Protecht Group improves the speed and quality of decision-making for CFOs as they create the annual financial reports to meet SOX compliance.

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6. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

SolarWinds Security Event Manager is an SIEM solution that improves security posture and enhances compliance with SOX and other regulations. It acts as an additional pair of eyes to look out for suspicious activities and respond to them in real-time.

Source: SolarWinds

Below are key features for SOX compliance.

Centralized Log Management

SolarWinds SEM centralizes log collection from different sources like network devices, systems, databases, and applications. It analyzes all this information to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of financial data – a key requirement for SOX.

Real-time Data

Another key feature is the real-time audit trail that’s displayed in a simple and intuitive user interface. It even offers advanced search functionality to analyze events, understand the root cause, and improve compliance.

Compliance Reports

SolarWinds SEM generates internal and external regulatory reports for SOX. Different departments can also customize the reporting templates for their specific needs and internal reporting requirements.

With such streamlined features, SolarWinds SEM provides an easy way to meet SOX compliance.

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7. Diligent ControlsBond

Diligent ControlsBond is a specialized tool for managing internal controls, a key aspect of SOX compliance. It uses automation to streamline workflows and tasks, and in the process, reduces your compliance costs.

Source: Diligent

Below are the notable features of ControlsBond that can ease SOX compliance.

Simplifies Internal Controls Management

Internal controls are hard to manage because of the overlapping processes involved, and this is where ControlsBond is a handy addition, as it can simplify these controls for you. Also, it automates the management process, regardless of the tools you use for implementing the internal controls.

Real-time Updates

Another aspect of ControlsBond is that it provides real-time updates on compliance issues and the state of remediation tasks. It also informs you of regulatory changes and their impact on your operations. Moreover, you can share the certification status and compliance issues across your organization.

Comprehensive Control

With ControlsBond, you have comprehensive visibility and control over the status of your compliance and remediation tasks. Your dashboard provides information on the owner of each control, whether it has been tested, and what is its current state. Armed with such information, you can better prioritize your compliance task lists.

Overall, ControlsBond centrally manages your internal controls and enables you to meet SOX compliance requirements.

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8. LogicManager

LogicManager is a financial reporting tool that streamlines the audit processes needed for SOX compliance. It analyzes issues, tracks the resolution processes, and generates insightful reports.

Source: LogicManager

Here’s a glance at LogicManager’s specific SOX compliance features.

Centralized Risk Assessment

LogicManager uses a centralized risk assessment framework to upload your risk-control matrix. With such a view, you can get a comprehensive view of the likely risks that can lead to non-compliance, so you can take remedial action right away.

Customizable Reports

You can customize the many reporting templates of LogicManager to create specific reports that meet SOX compliance. It also aggregates compliance management information and presents it in different views to different individuals based on the role and authorization within your organization.

Standardized Compliance

LogicManager’s pre-built control frameworks are based on best practices, scoring, and best practices followed by your industry. Using these frameworks, you can standardize compliance, identify issues, and remediate them.

In all, LogicManager comes with many convenient features to help your organization adhere to SOX compliance requirements.

Request a demo.

9. Workiva

Workiva is a specialized platform that streamlines processes and workflows to ensure they are SOX-compliant. Its many capabilities like built-in gen AI and automated request handling improve productivity and save on time and effort.

Source: Workiva

Here’s a look at Workiva’s features that ease SOX compliance.

Centralized Data and Workflows

Workiva stores issues, certifications, and documents in a central place, making it easy for authorized users to access them when needed. Moreover, it increases visibility and builds trust while supporting collaboration across departments and teams.

Automation

Another key aspect of Workiva is its automation capabilities that take the human element out of mundane tasks like documentation updates, PBC requests, testing, and more. You can even extend it to any task that is repetitive and slows you down.

Internal Controls Management

Workiva combines internal controls management with financial reporting and ESG to manage risks and their impact on SOX compliance. It also supports data-driven business decisions with on-demand insights.

Overall, Workiva is a one-stop shop for managing SOX compliance.

Request a demo.

10. Netwrix Auditor

Netwrix Auditor is a behavior analysis and risk mitigation solution that provides visibility and control into user access, changes, and configurations within your IT environments. It offers the intelligence to identify security gaps, suspicious activities, and anomalies that can lead to possible non-compliance.

Source: Netwrix

Let’s now look at Netwrix’s features that identify issues and help with compliance.

Risk Assessment

Netwrix continuously monitors your cloud and on-premises environments for potential risks. In particular, it looks for gaps and anomalies in account management, security permissions, and data governance, and provides the intelligence required to mitigate them. This risk assessment and remediation process can make your organization SOX-compliant.

Control and Visibility into Financial Records

Another key aspect of SOX compliance is visibility and control of financial records, as the CFO is eventually responsible for signing off the annual compliance report. To achieve this visibility, it creates and maintains audit trails. Moreover, it even offers video recording to make the concerned users accountable for their financial actions.

User Access Control

Netwrix regularly checks the user groups that have access to the financial records of your organization. It also avoids complex group nesting among user groups to prevent unauthorized access. Moreover, it sends notifications when a new or unauthorized user tries to access the financial database.

With such top-notch security features, Netwrix helps your organization become SOX-compliant.

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Thus, these are the top ten best SOX compliance tools that meet our stringent standards.

Final Thoughts

In summary, SOX is a financial compliance standard that applies to publicly listed companies operating in the U.S. Complying with the 11 provisions of this regulation is not easy and requires a concerted effort across the organization. To ease this compliance process, we have identified the best tools that streamline the operational, security, and reporting aspects that can eventually make your organization SOX-compliant. We hope this information helps you to move towards SOX compliance with confidence.