SmartSuite for the Controls Testing Lead

Each test procedure carries its evidence standard and evaluation criteria in Compliance Assessments & Testing, with the sampling approach you set written alongside, so testers execute to your standard and a reviewer can re-perform from the workpaper.

Assign tests by control, period and tester with automated reminders; overdue and unstarted tests show on a dashboard so you reallocate before the quarter closes rather than discover the gap after it.

Workpapers route to you for review before a result is final, with comments and sign-off recorded in the record, so consistency is enforced in the workflow rather than in a year-end clean-up.

Evidence requests go to the Control Owner with the deadline and the evidence standard attached, and reminders follow automatically, so a late sample is visible to you early enough to act.

Test IT general controls and business process controls in the same connected workflow, so the Internal Auditor relying on your work sees one coherent program rather than two calendars.

Standard procedures and templates live in one library used by the Compliance Analyst and the Internal Auditor, so a control tested for SOX and for ISO 27001 uses the same steps and the same evidence.

Dashboards show every key control's test status for the cycle, by owner and period, so gaps in coverage are visible while there is still time to close them.

Logged exceptions are tagged by control, cause and owner, so you can show the Head of Internal Controls where failures recur and which remediations actually held.

The AI Assistant in a SmartDoc field drafts the cycle's testing summary and deficiency narratives from the recorded results, so the report to the Head of Internal Controls starts from the data rather than a blank page.

Internal Controls Manager

The Controls Testing Lead owns the control testing program: the testing calendar and sampling approach for key controls, the written test procedures and evidence standards, tester assignments, the quality review of workpapers and the logging of exceptions for deficiency evaluation. The aim is that every key control is tested on schedule and that results are consistent enough for the Head of Internal Controls, internal audit and the external auditor to rely on. Reporting testing status and exception trends completes the remit.

Compliance Assessments & Testing schedules and executes recurring control tests from a testing engine, with the procedure and the evidence attached to each test. The Controls Testing Lead sets the calendar by control frequency, assigns testers and tracks completion against the schedule, and each tester works from the written procedure rather than their own interpretation of it. Because the evidence sits on the test record, a reviewer can check the work without asking the tester to find it.

Internal Audit Management keeps workpapers and sign-offs traceable, so a reviewer, the Internal Auditor or the external auditor can see who tested what, against which procedure, with what evidence and who reviewed it. That is the re-performance standard PCAOB AS 2201 expects and the basis on which internal audit decides how much to rely on management's testing. The Controls Testing Lead's quality review is recorded as a sign-off on the workpaper rather than a note in an email.

An exception is logged against the test and routed to deficiency evaluation and remediation in SOX Compliance, so the Controls Testing Lead does not have to carry it across by hand. The exception keeps its link to the control, the sample and the evidence, which is what the SOX Program Manager needs when evaluating severity and aggregation. The Control Owner then documents the response and remediation in Issues Management, and the re-test can be scheduled once the fix is in place.

SmartSuite reports testing completion and exception trends by control, by owner and by period, straight from the test records. The Head of Internal Controls and the Internal Controls Manager can see how far through the calendar the program is, which owners carry the most exceptions and whether a control is failing repeatedly across periods. That replaces the status spreadsheet most testing leads maintain and gives the deficiency conversation a factual starting point.

Begin with the key control list, the test frequencies and the procedures you already have; these become the controls, the schedule and the attached procedures in Compliance Assessments & Testing. Sampling rules and evidence standards are written once against each control and then apply to every cycle. Testers and Compliance Analysts are assigned to their controls, Control Owners respond to requests in the same records, and the first cycle run in the system gives you the baseline for completion and exception reporting.