Workiva, creator of the Wdesk cloud-based productivity platform for business data collaboration and reporting, this week introduced a new feature called Evidence Management for Wdesk that significantly improves how companies document and test their internal controls over financial reporting required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX).

With Evidence Management for Wdesk, internal audit and SOX compliance teams can, for the first time, digitally embed and annotate evidence in work papers with a complete audit trail. "This expanded functionality is an important step in creating evidence-based risk management, which helps our customers better identify, assess and mitigate risks," said Workiva CEO Matt Rizai. "Managing large numbers of disconnected pieces of evidence manually, and often on an ad-hoc basis, simply doesn't cut it in today's complex business environment."

Key capabilities of Evidence Management for Wdesk include:

Evidence Requests: Internal audit teams can request evidence and track responses in Wdesk with a centralized, real-time view of all tasks. Once the evidence is provided, it is automatically attached to the testing document.

Attachments: Teams can also attach supporting evidence, such as PDF or common spreadsheet files, directly to testing documents and link that information together, thereby making Wdesk a repository for control information.

Markups: Internal auditors can view and annotate documents within Wdesk, which makes it easier to locate and validate supporting evidence of related internal controls.

Exports: Users can export testing documents and work papers so that supporting evidence can be sent as a single file to external audit teams.

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