What to look for in SOX compliance software
By The Substantively team · Internal audit
Sarbanes-Oxley turned internal control over financial reporting into a documented, tested, and signed-off process. The right SOX compliance software should make that process lighter — not bury a small team under a platform built for a Fortune 100 program. Here is what actually matters when you evaluate a tool.
A control registry your team maintains once
SOX work revolves around a population of controls mapped to financial statement assertions. Good software lets you maintain that registry in one place, version it, and reuse it across testing cycles — rather than copying a spreadsheet every quarter and losing the change history.
Test tasks that record a conclusion and its history
Each control test should capture who tested it, when, the sample, the conclusion, and what changed if it was re-performed. When a test fails, the software should prompt a finding linked back to the control — so the deficiency, its severity, and management's response live together.
Evidence custody is the part most tools get wrong
Walkthroughs and tests of operating effectiveness generate evidence: screenshots, reports, signed memos. Many platforms pull that evidence into their own storage, which means your auditors' workpapers now live in a vendor's cloud under the vendor's retention. For a SOX program that is a control weakness in itself.
Substantively takes the opposite approach: evidence stays in your Microsoft 365 tenant, linked by reference. We store the metadata — controls, tests, conclusions, findings — and never the file bytes. See how the data boundary works.
A checklist for your evaluation
- Reusable control registry with change history.
- Test tasks that capture conclusions and re-performance.
- Findings auto-linked to the failed control.
- Evidence kept in your tenant, not the vendor's storage.
- An append-only activity trail for the audit committee.
- Per-seat pricing that doesn't meter your evidence.
If keeping custody of your evidence matters to your program, it's worth seeing the model in practice — start a trial or read the security story.