Our approach to financial reporting compliance: PwC perspectives powered by Workiva technology

You don’t have to ask business leaders if they’d prefer to redeploy staff from Sarbanes-Oxley compliance to achieving strategic business goals. (We know the answer would be a resounding, “Yes!”) 

Especially in a dynamic business environment wrought with disruption, inflation, and resource shortages, stronger controls and better visibility into specific risks, issues, and outliers can help companies more readily spot both problems and business opportunities. This is where freeing up your staff from manual processes can reallocate their brain cycles to improve your company’s competitiveness.

But yet, companies until now have been careful about streamlining Financial Reporting compliance, as it certainly needs to be done correctly to effectively and efficiently manage risks.

For years, finance and Financial Reporting functions have been trudging the Financial Reporting compliance path knowing that the job simply had to be done, and done right. Some internal audit teams can find themselves consumed with Financial Reporting efforts, draining time and energy that could be spent on addressing emerging or strategic risks. Instead of gaining efficiency, many find their costs and hours for Financial Reporting compliance have expanded greatly over the years.

From where we sit at PwC, it appears a confluence of technologies has emerged that, if tied together with expertise and precision, can offer true relief. We see a tipping point, where decades of experience with Financial Reporting compliance and the emergence of cloud technology can help. 

At a time when remote and hybrid workplaces are settling in as the new way of doing business, the move to the cloud and automated capabilities can help save the day by providing enhanced insight and visibility into the overall Financial Reporting program, even productively bringing precise improvement to business models, despite the dispersion of staff. For instance, Financial Reporting requires both internal and external audits. Bringing all parties into a single collaborative environment, rather than manually sharing files, is an immediate win through time savings and enhanced consistency. Similarly, data that can flow through with automation rather than manual inputs saves considerable time, removes the potential for costly errors, and fuels discovery of Financial Reporting automation opportunities.

With that in mind, PwC has been constructing a full Financial Reporting compliance ecosystem, where PwC’s Financial Reporting methodology can be applied in part, or holistically, for Financial Reporting compliance transformation. The latest enhancement is the integration and development of a PwC-configured version of the Workiva platform’s controls solution.

Data-forward future, designed around you

PwC’s configured version of the Workiva platform creates a clear path to help smooth the Financial Reporting journey, while also putting in place the transparency, guardrails and reporting that allow company builders to know the job is being done right at every step.

The delivery ecosystem is flexible and can be customized to include a perspective on how to optimize Workiva for workflow management. It has also been designed to interface with PwC’s proprietary controls-testing solutions that offer automated controls testing or insights to further identify control automation opportunities. All of this is delivered with an emphasis on quality and efficiency.

The capabilities of the Workiva platform elevate and automate the job. Workiva is a connected reporting platform that enables ingestion of existing financial information and risk-assessment inputs from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, for instance. The connected platform enables integrated reporting across Financial Reporting compliance efforts, audit activities and enterprise risk management. 

This type of collaborative, cloud-based platform can then be enabled with linking capabilities, which helps reduce time spent manually updating risk and control changes in narratives, walkthroughs, flowcharts, testing templates, and dashboards.

Workflows can be developed to route requests, testing, and certifications to designated users. Control deficiencies can be evaluated and aggregated. Features can capture changes in controls and reporting for executive teams and audit committees can be automated.

PwC’s technology and experience, including risk assessment and scoping, control documentation and design, and control testing of operating effectiveness, are all folded in, which further enhances the value derived from Wdesk. The future is now - PwC and Workiva are already building connections to enable digital testing of manual controls in PwC’s Test Factory and we are planning further enhancements to allow integration with PwC’s Enterprise Control platform for testing and monitoring of automated controls.

These capabilities mean Financial Reporting compliance can be both simplified and trusted, and after 20 years, some relief and efficiency can finally be realized.