How automating segregation of duties monitoring will help you strengthen organisation-wide fraud prevention.
When external auditors come skulking around in your financial reports, your internal controls should be well-defined, rolled out and nailed on.
One of the less-known checkboxes under the umbrella of internal controls is the segregation of duties (SOD). If you’ve glazed over already and need the entry-level stuff, read our Brief Guide to Segregation of Duties in ERP.
If you’re up to speed on basic definitions, here you’ll learn how automating segregation of duties monitoring will actively help you strengthen organization-wide fraud prevention and compliance governance.
Why is segregation of duties so important?
Although SOD is often treated as a minor side-note in the grand project of internal compliance controls, auditors treat it as a fundamental audit objective ensuring that security errors and irregularities are properly prevented or detected in the natural course of business.
Think of it as a ground-level foundation in your compliance house-of-cards; if your segregation of duties game is weak, the entire project of your compliance readiness can come crashing down.
Each ‘floor’ in that house-of-cards represents a different level where the SOD process needs to be present and actively monitored for financial risk mitigation and fraud prevention.
It’ll be like failing a driving test on a handful of minor infringements; you might have pulled all the big manoeuvres immaculately, but if your observation and mirror-checks were off, it’ll be ‘better luck next time’.
SOD processes at different levels
Individual-level: SOD at its most basic—different duties are performed by different individuals.
Unit-level SoD: Different functions are performed by different business units or departments at different locations.
Company-level SoD: At this level, operations are performed by different legal entities. E.g. investments made by a subsidiary may need to be validated by the controlling company.
The net benefits of automating segregation of duties process monitoring
Once you’ve clearly defined strong SOD processes to separate tasks and duties into multiple elements (so that no one person is solely in control of conflicting duties), you’ll need an effective way of ensuring that duties-separation remains consistent.
That’s where effective segregation of duties monitoring tool comes into the picture as a key asset in strengthening fraud prevention.
Imagine you have a warehouse team member doing both the invoicing and crediting. That’s a big SOD problem. If you’re an organisation making use of SYSPRO ERP, Enterpriseworx can help you both detect and report continually on those kinds of off-radar fraud and security-governance issues with the help of our native Segregation of Duties Tool.
Sound like something you’d like to speak to us about?
Reduce cost & complexity
Instead of endless meetings, emails, multi-stakeholder alignment and HR alignment, automated SOD monitoring can be performed at-a-glance through intuitive dashboards highlighting SOD risk across different roles and responsibilities, office locations and processes.
Manage access across hybrid environments
Because organizations still today battle with managing access across hybrid environments—with a combination of on-prem and cloud systems, applications-access monitoring is a giant challenge.
Segregation of duties monitoring tools prevents access conflicts across hybrid data-asset environments by flagging potential access issues before they become active breaches.
Maintain compliance readiness
Whether it’s SOX, SOC2 or ISO27001, demonstrating segregation of duties is one of the many barriers to passing the examination and getting your compliance certification.
As roles, responsibilities and associated user access evolve over time, the forces of business entropy gradually erode the SOD processes you worked so hard to implement, making compliance readiness a constantly moving target.
Automatically monitoring segregations of duties through SaaS tools means your SOD process integrity remains protected—and so does the SOD part of your compliance readiness.
Automate segregation of duties monitoring in SYSPRO ERP
As a select SYSPRO UK implementation partner, Enterpriseworx is working with organisations undergoing ERP change to SYSPRO to both manage SYSPRO implementation and apply segregation of duties monitoring and reporting using our very own SYSPRO SOD tool.
If you’re currently using SYSPRO ERP and need a robust way of automating segregation of duties monitoring, book a demo and learn how Enterpriseoworx can help.
If you’re thinking of switching to SYSPRO ERP and need an experienced, SYSPRO implementation partner, speak to us.
