Case Study: Innovative retail company achieves paperless SOX compliance and streamlined SEC reporting with Workiva

Going Paperless for Sarbanes-Oxley

A newly public retail company that relied on a traditional financial printer faced a paper-heavy, error-prone SEC filing process with a three-day “pencils down” period and last-minute CFO edits. With a lean compliance team of two that outsourced internal audit, the company struggled to collect documentation from 19 process owners across 150 controls; an external audit identified 80 documentation gaps and the shared-drive workflow created version-control and organization problems.

The company adopted Wdesk—first for SEC reporting, then in a phased rollout for SOX documentation, certification, risk assessments, evidence management and COSO mapping—using live-linked documents and shared viewer/creator access for outsourced auditors. The result was seamless, secure collaboration with a full audit trail, elimination of version issues, easier management buy-in, scalable internal ownership of controls, and clear transparency for the CEO and CFO that controls are tested and free of material weaknesses.