policyIQ Blog

We’re excited about policyIQ version 6.7.

2010-09-03T12:36:00Z

The start of September is my favorite time of the year. It's not exactly "cool" yet here in the Pittsburgh area, but the mornings are decidedly cooler than they were just a few weeks ago. I'm putting away my sandals and breaking out my loafers.

And while I'm breaking out my winter wardrobe, the policyIQ team is preparing to break out our latest release of the policyIQ application. Version 6.7 is on its way in the coming weeks.

We've been talking about version 6.7 for awhile. Why?

We're excited! It's not often that we get to launch new features that not only improve your policyIQ experience, but truly open up entirely new ways to use our application. With version 6.7's Custom Alerts feature, we want you to re-evaluate the way you look at policyIQ.

So what's the big deal with Custom Alerts?

I'm not going to spend too much time dwelling on the details of Custom Alerts. If you want details, you can check out this blog post that provided a sneak peek into the feature, or this recent blog post where we summed up our latest training session that illustrated this new feature.

Instead, let me just tell you about some of the things that policyIQ can do for you when you set up Custom Alerts:

Send an email message to your Process Owners when a Test has failed in their business area during your SOX testing efforts. Include the next steps - such as instructing those Process Owners to create and submit an Action Plan.
Escalate (via email or Dashboard alert) to a supervisor or Department Director when an Action Plan Due Date is reached. Include the most recent copy of the Action Plan from policyIQ, so that they can review and confirm if all of the tasks have been completed and the documentation has been updated by the Action Plan Owner. And they can do it all without logging into policyIQ!
Send email alerts to Contract Owners when contracts are within 90, 60, or 30 days of their Expiration or Renewal Date. Include instructions for the best steps to take to follow-up. Create other alerts to go out to the Legal Department, Procurement Director or Managers to keep them updated on contracts coming up for renewal.
Send an email to your Board of Directors - who may not even be users of policyIQ - to notify them when critical documentation is updated or posted. Include the information as attachments to the email message and provide them with the details without requiring them to be policyIQ users.

I'm sure I would be exaggerating to say that the possibilities are endless - but I have yet to find the "end" of the ideas that I have for implementing this great new feature. In fact, all month we are going to focus on how Custom Alerts can be used in various areas - Compliance, Contract Management, Project Management and more.

What else is in store?

While we're excited about Custom Alerts, there are also some great improvements you can look for in version 6.7. Such as:

Report Categories - now available both as user-specific and site-wide options.
Check Out to Others - Check a page out to another user more easily and automatically add him/her as an Editor in a single step.
Expired and Expiring Items on your policyIQ Dashboard are now more manageable, with better filter and toolbar options when viewing the complete list.
Search for Forms in the Home module using the simple Search functions. Results in Search will now include Forms.
Send email notifications (today or on a future date) to those users added via the Import function.

We continue to strive to solve your business problems - with solutions in policyIQ and enhancements to make our product (and YOU) more efficient in your daily work. Stay tuned to the blog this month as we explore the new features.

Don't hesitate to contact us at support@policyIQ.com with any questions about this release - or suggestions for the next one!

Wrapping up August with Introduction of Custom Alerts!

2010-08-30T21:03:00Z

Thank you to those of you who joined us for our recent CPE session where we highlighted the use of policyIQ for Contract Management and took the opportunity to introduce a highly anticipated new policyIQ feature: Custom Alerts. As we wrap up our month of focusing on communication practices and features, we’re very excited to be able to bring you this powerful functionality!

policyIQ users of all types have come to rely on policyIQ Reports to help them oversee and stay on top of their priorities and deliverables. For example, they might create a report of all Pages within a certain department or process that are due for review (expiring) within the next 30 days. While using Reports to stay on top of deliverables is certainly helpful, the process is still a bit manual.

With the new Custom Alerts feature, Page Administrators can bring some automation to this work by alerting virtually anyone (themselves, their supervisor, a stakeholder in another department, or even a vendor or customer that does not have access to their policyIQ site) in real time that a milestone has not been met as scheduled or a review date is coming up. These alerts can be set up on all policyIQ field types other than text fields (Rich HTML Text and Short Text fields), so the number and variety of possible alerts is limited only by your imagination.

This feature lends itself to those solutions that involve tracking and compliance with a number of deliverables—so we naturally thought of Contract Management as the solution to showcase this new feature. Still, it has its applications across nearly every solution! (Keep an eye on our blog in September as we explore how Custom Alerts add value to many solutions.)

Why use policyIQ for Contract Management?

policyIQ provides key features and functionality that help organizations to better secure, manage and automate many parts of the contract management process—at a fraction of the cost of dedicated contract management tools! Below are some examples of policyIQ features that serve organizations' contract management needs:

User-friendly interface allowing employees from various backgrounds to build an easily reportable and searchable library of contracts
File scanning and attachment capability for your formal contracts/documents
Take advantage of customizable Templates and Template Fields to track desired variables:

Contract Terms
Milestones
Reporting Dates
Renewal Dates
Currency related information

Secure contract information (while providing centralized access and version control, manage visibility and write capability)
More easily monitor, comply with and renew contracts with Reports and Custom Alerts

Contract Templates

While the policyIQ team does not yet provide pre-defined templates for tracking data related to specific types of contracts, policyIQ does allow you to customize your own policyIQ Templates—as many Templates as you’d like, with as many Fields as you’d like to capture and track the variables that are most important to your organization.

Within policyIQ’s Templates, keep in mind that the application allows you to specify which users should have access to create certain types of content and to route it to the appropriate users who must review and approve the content. You are also able to require that certain Fields be complete before a Page can be published and you’re able to “lock down” Fields so that they cannot be changed while the content is published.

Consider how Custom Alerts may facilitate your Contract Management process

If your process follows the typical phases of contract creation, negotiation, monitoring, compliance and renewal (re-negotiation), then you’ll find that policyIQ’s Custom Alerts can be used to help throughout the process to keep team members aware and on task! Here are some examples:

Monitoring

Send an alert regarding a workflow change (i.e. a new contract was approved)
Alert if the contract obligation is over a pre-determined dollar amount

Compliance

Alert Operations management if a milestone was/was not met
Alert account managers and operations managers that a reporting date is approaching

Renewal

Alert procurement, sales, and partner that a contract expiration date is approaching

Some other highlights related to Custom Alerts in policyIQ:

If you already have some ideas on how to use Custom Alerts within your current policyIQ content, you can add alerts “in bulk”. Simply run a report of Pages that share the Field to which you’d like to add an alert and select the appropriate option from the Edit menu in the Reports module.

You can send alerts to people that do not have access to your policyIQ site! You will simply add the person’s email address rather than selecting the individual from among your policyIQ users. Of course, if sending an alert to someone who is not a policyIQ user, you’ll want to send him a “copy” of the policyIQ Page rather than a link into policyIQ.

If you choose to send a link as a part of your email alert to a policyIQ user, the link that they click within their email message will take the user directly to the related policyIQ Page.

Multiple alerts relating to multiple fields can be sent to multiple people for each page—consider the possibilities!

Let’s brainstorm together!

We would be happy to discuss your needs and explore options for how policyIQ might serve you in the area of Contract Management and with Custom Alerts. Please contact us to set up a time to chat.

For more informaton related specifically to the recent Contract Management training session, such as the presentation slides and the link to the recording, check out the related Help section in policyIQ.

Preparing for conversion to IFRS? policyIQ offers a project management and communication tool!

2010-08-24T17:13:00Z

Hello all, it is time to talk IFRS again. While IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) adoption in the United States continues to move forward at a very slow pace, it does continue to move forward. Many corporations have already begun to prepare for the move towards conversion to the IFRS practices – and Resources Global Professionals and the policyIQ team are ready to assist those organizations in their efforts.

Keeping with this month’s theme of team communication we will take a closer look at how an IFRS team can utilize a checklist in policyIQ to track and share project status. A checklist is a great method of communicating what is expected and then ensuring those expectations are met.

How can policyIQ be used to support an IFRS conversion process?

The first phase in any IFRS conversion project is to understand the organization. Regardless of how well you think you know your organization, it is recommended that you start with a full assessment of the organization. This assessment is designed to best understand the working of the company and be able to accurately estimate the scope of the conversion project. The IFRS team at Resources Global has created an Enterprise Assessment Checklist that reviews the various divisions of an organization utilizing policyIQ Form Templates. The Enterprise Checklist is divided into 5 main areas covering all major business areas including management, internal initiatives, business units, functional departments and reporting. Each of these general topics is then divided into sub areas and then each of the sub areas has a set of questions that comprises one Form Template.

Communicate Project Status

Since IFRS conversion projects often consist of a group of people, often geographically dispersed, there is a high need to consistently and continuously communicate. By creating a Public Form Template, Forms can be assigned by a project manager or they can be grabbed and completed by anyone on the team. From an open communication standpoint, everyone on the team can see all the pieces of the checklist when utilizing Public Forms. Also remember that all Form Templates can be utilized as many times as necessary. This is extremely helpful when an organization has many business units, where a Form may need to be submitted by each of the business units in a specific area.

Another way that policyIQ creates open communication is by providing the ability to make Form Responses visible in the Home module. In an IFRS conversion project, any team member can check the Completed Checklist Folder at any time to see answers relevant to what they are working on. This allows the entire team to have visibility into the status of the project. To have completed Form Templates automatically directed into a specific Folder, simply specify that Folder on the Form Template.

Finally, reporting on a checklist offers overall visibility into the status of the project. From reports, the project manager can assess what forms have been assigned, which are in progress and which are completed. Visibility such as this is vital when tackling a large project such as IFRS implementation.

Want to learn more about the IFRS Conversion tool built by Resources Global Professionals?

Communicate software QA results testing in policyIQ! (or "policyIQ uses policyIQ to manage policyIQ testing!")

2010-08-19T12:56:00Z

All month we've been talking about "communication" and giving you all ideas about how you better communicate with your organizations. We've talked about how SOX teams might use policyIQ to better collect and communicate their data, how your critical policy updates can be announced throughout the organization, and even how you can keep communication open with the policyIQ support team when you have questions or ideas.

But what about us? It is high time that we let you learn about some of the ways that the policyIQ team uses our own application to better communicate with each other. Because we're approaching a new release of policyIQ (with lots of great features like custom alerts and site wide report categories!), our entire team is very busy in the final stages of testing our latest release. It seems like a good time to tell you a little bit about the Quality Assurance process - and how we use Forms to manage this final stage of software release testing.

The process:

The final stage of policyIQ release testing involves many team members - and a slew of detailed scenarios. The scenarios are created and documented in Excel spreadsheets, with every step and every mouse-click documented. For any given release, we might have more than 20 detailed scenarios that are distributed to the testing team - and we run through our testing in multiple rounds so that each scenario gets tested by a different team members each time. When the scenarios come back to the QA manager, the spreadsheets are reviewed to see at which step(s) the tester may have documented a.) critical failures in the product, b.) unclear process or screen design, or c.) suggestions for improvement in future releases.

Managing the distribution, collection, retesting, documentation - and everything else that goes along with software quality assurance requires a great deal of organization. It's a good thing we have an app for that!

The Form Template:

We have created one Form Template (named "QA Scenario") to track all of the critical pieces of data that we collect each time a scenario is tested. The fields on that Form Template that the respondent is asked to fill out are the following:

1.) Date Tested
2.) Build Tested
3.) Completed scenario worksheet
4.) Testing Notes

Additional fields are on the Form Template, but available only to the Approver to complete after the scenario has been submitted:

5.) Pass / Fail
6.) Review Notes
7.) Issues Entered

A few other notes about our Form Template:

The QA Managers and Director of Technology are the "Approvers" on the Form Template, so that they can all see the responses and run reports as necessary to keep track of status.
The QA Manager who is responsible for coordinating the final stage of testing, however, is added in the field "Always notify and email when submitted", so that she receives the notifications immediately.

The Form List(s):

For each round of testing, a Form List is created. Within that Form List, the "QA Scenario" Template is added to the Form List one time for EACH scenario that must be tested. If there are 25 scenarios for a specific release, there will be 25 instances of that Form Template within our Form List.

Each instance - or List Template - is then edited individually. The Name is edited to reflect a specific scenario name, and the spreadsheet for that specific scenario is added as an Attachment to the List Template. When the Form List Templates are all edited, each one is a unique scenario (including unique attachment) that can be assigned to a team member.

Before running the Form List, each List Template within the List is assigned to a team member. Because most team members are asked to test more than one scenario in any given round, we use the toolbar at the top of the table to select those scenarios that will be assigned to "Stephenie" (for example), and make our assignments.

When we Run the Form List, we set an Open and Due Date on which the scenarios need to be completed and returned, and we push out the Forms to the testing team members.

Reviewing the Responses:

The QA Manager who oversees the final round of testing receives an alert - both on her Dashboard and via email - when one of the QA Scenario forms is submitted. She can then open the form, review any initial notes - and then open and review the detailed scenario steps within the spreadsheet. After the review, she can document any Issues, include any additional notes, and determine whether or not the scenario has passed or failed.

After all of the forms are received back for a particular round, reports are generated to show which scenarios have failed, and exactly what issues have been reported.

Running the Form List Again (and Again):

When any fixes have been applied to the testing sites, scenarios are sent out once again to the team. The Form List is copied (already named and with scenarios attached properly). The QA Manager can then rename the new Form List (for example, "6.7 QA: Round 2") and reassign the scenarios to new team members.

Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary.

We expect that all departments have a lot of similar processes, requiring the distribution of forms or spreadsheets to request information back from a number of people. Perhaps this might have sparked a few thoughts for you regarding how you could apply something similar to one of your processes!

As always, we'd love to help you build a Form in policyIQ to make your work day more efficient. Contact us at support@policyIQ.com.

(Oh - and we're still working through some of our final QA testing on release 6.7 - but be on the lookout for more information coming soon! And check our earlier blog post for a sneak peek at what is coming!)

Little used Page property could help you manage multiple Page contributors.

2010-08-18T15:53:00Z

Does your documentation process call for several people to contribute to the development of content? Maybe you are working to manually manage multiple levels of review and approval. Many policyIQ users are aware that they can enforce the review process by utilizing the formal Approval capability—established in the policyIQ Setup module on each Template. We can see, however, that many organizations are not utilizing the Editors property on Pages to further manage their hierarchy of contributors and reviewers.

In many policyIQ sites, we see that the Editors on a Page are the same as the Administrators, illustrating that they have not been adjusted to represent a different set of users.

Let’s be sure that you are aware of the differences between the Administrators and Editors of items: Administrators are able to edit all properties of an item, while Editors may only change the Viewers property and any Template fields.

Editors are not able to Publish an item.

So, what this means is that you can designate a group as Editors to work on a Page. The Editors can give their 2 cents and represent the perspective of the hands-on operator of the task or procedure. You don’t have to worry about line staff publishing unauthorized content. Next, an Editor will “check in” the Page which can be auto-routed back to their manager or an Administrator of the Page. The Administrator can then make any final adjustments to the content and review the Page prior to choosing the Publish option which sends the Page on to the director or Approver for final review.

Can you see a possible application of adding this additional level of contributors to your content development? Are you still partly cloudy on how to implement this property in your process? Contact us and let us know what you’re trying to accomplish and we’ll guide you toward the workflow options in policyIQ that will best support your development, review and approval process.

Got questions? Join our live Q&A!

2010-08-17T13:34:00Z

Do you have some policyIQ questions you've never gotten around to asking? Would you be interested in finding out if there's a better way to accomplish that certain task? Well now's your chance to ask those nagging questions and learn a few new things in the process!

Join us for our monthly Q&A session, where we give you the chance to meet live with a policyIQ expert for free! Nothing is off-topic, so bring any questions you'd like us to answer.

At the beginning of our session, we spend a few minutes highlighting some lesser-known aspects of policyIQ. This month we're going to show our attendees the different channels of communication we've put in place between our users and our team. Then we will open the session up to you!

The session takes place live in our online training environment, so we are able to visually demonstrate the answer to your question while we provide an answer. Click here to register for our August Q&A session!

Communicate your critical updates - and ensure that your message is received!

2010-08-16T12:09:00Z

Throughout the month of August, our theme is "Communication" - and one of your key avenues for communicating to your audience in policyIQ is the Dashboard. The policyIQ Dashboard communicates tasks that a user must complete (such as Forms Assigned and In Progress, or Checked Out to Me), reports that a manager might frequently run (such as Favorite Reports), or the status of the database to a Site Administrator (in the Administrative Overview).

How do you communicate critical updates?

One of the most critical types of communication is often overlooked. If a policy, procedure, control or other type of critical content is updated, how do you communicate that update to the right people?

Let's say, for example, that we've implemented a new Time and Expense System. With the release of the T&E system, our organization has updated the Time Reporting Procedures and wants to be sure that every employee has read those new procedures. The procedures are stored in policyIQ (of course!).

We could simply send out an email to all employees - including the new Time Reporting Procedures as an attachment. But how can we be sure that our employees have read them? We could request read receipts, but we know that many employees send automatic read receipts even if they don't glance at the email. We need something better!

Publish, Email and Set Required Viewing!

policyIQ offers a simple way of communicating those updates - and tracking who has read the item - on the policyIQ Dashboard's Pages to Read section. Recently published content can appear on the user's Dashboard - and will continue to appear until he/she has clicked to open the page. (We tried to implement "brain scan" technology to ensure that the users were actually reading the page, but sadly we're only able to confirm that he/she has opened it. We'll keep working on reading brain waves, though!)

How does it get there? When publishing any page in policyIQ, the publisher can decide whether the updated content is "required" to be read by any or all of the Viewers. If "required," the Page will appear on the selected users' Dashboards. Simple as that.

As much as we'd like to believe that your employees are logging into policyIQ every single day, we know that just isn't the case. The publisher can also choose to send an email message, which will go out as soon as the page is published to all those individuals selected. He can customize the Subject and Message, alerting users that critical updates to those procedures must be reviewed by all employees - and the link to the policyIQ site will always be included in the email!

What makes that better than sending the updates via email?

Not only does policyIQ provide you with the mechanism to communicate the updates, but your content administrators can then go into the item and review the list of users who have (or have not) actually opened it! Just open the page and go to History à View Usage. There you'll find a list of all users who can view, a designation of those who were "required" to view it, and the last time that the user actually opened the page.

What if we have TOO MANY Pages to Read?

Believe it or not, this is not an uncommon issue. Some policyIQ users may have published every update as "required reading." Like the boy who cried wolf, the Pages to Read section just doesn't get the appropriate attention because there are simply too many items that are not important.

Get a fresh start! Ask our support team for some assistance, and we can give your entire organization a fresh start on Pages to Read. We can perform a one-time "remove all" procedure to remove everything from Pages to Read and give you a fresh start.

“Sound the alarm! I need the latest…”

2010-08-13T13:28:00Z

The term “communication” can be defined or interpreted in a number of ways. For some of us, any exchange of information is a relief and satisfactory, but for others, we long for and are seeking means for more effective communication. policyIQ provides that means for compliance and testing groups all over the country and the world.

Many policyIQ clients have testers carrying out their tests in a wide span of geographic locations and all of their information needs to be tracked and conveyed, often, to a handful of strategically placed leads and eventually to a central location or SOX Project Management Office. Before procuring policyIQ, most organizations use a combination of Excel files, Word documents and email to communicate and pass information back and forth to each other.

“Does anyone know the status of TFC-492? Has it been tested? Re-tested? Moved beyond first review? How did it perform? When can we expect to receive it? Does anyone know who has that latest version of the Test and supporting information? Can you help me to update our master spreadsheet with the latest information before our meeting in the morning?”

This reminds me of one of those old Looney Tunes episodes where they sound the alarm and all the cars respond all at once, going in all directions and crashing into each other! Using email to communicate across a large organization working through hundreds of tests, there will absolutely be some overlooked emails and some poor and inaccurate information will undoubtedly—and mistakenly—be passed along.

Enter a web-based, relational database that is centrally accessible allowing for group development of content, with editing and viewing security always to the master version of any document with simple and powerful reporting capability—in a word: policyIQ.

At any point in time, testers, reviewers and compliance officers can log in, look up the status of tests and analyze that status from a number of perspectives by simply adjusting the filters on a report. No need for that email to be broadcast to the team. No need to gather spreadsheets from the team to regularly update some master list. All of the necessary information can be easily reported on and presented in a moment’s notice.

If you have questions about setting up your content development, review and approval process and the related reports in policyIQ, let us know. We’re on board to help you with more effective communication!

Keep open lines of communication with policyIQ Support!

2010-08-05T13:10:00Z

Have you ever gotten stumped while working in policyIQ? Are you convinced there must be an easier way to go about a certain task, but you just don't know how? Maybe you can't understand why a Page isn't visible to a user you would expect it to be, or you don't know why a Report isn't returning some of the results you'd expect. Well don't just brush those questions aside - give us a call!

Our support team is eager to hear from you and assist you with whatever needs you may have. If you have a problem or a question, chances are our support team has addressed it multiple times in the past, and we'd be able to get you on the right track in no time!

Reasons to contact support?

Perhaps everything's going perfectly for you in policyIQ and you've had no reason to call our support team. Great! However, there are still a few things the support team may be able to help you with.

RSS/Syndication Features

Would you like to use policyIQ's RSS features? You can learn about these features by watching our training videos on Syndicating content and subscribing to RSS feeds. To gain access to this functionality, though, you'll first need to contact the support team and ask them to enable the feature in your site.

Site Cleanup

Do you have content that is no longer in use and could be removed from your site? Our support team can walk you through the best way to clean up this content, including using archiving options like Snapshots to ensure that the data is accessible in the future. This exercise has benefits beyond keeping your content current, as our support team might also be able to reduce your overall database size post-cleanup!

Importing Content

Our Import tool lets you upload large amounts of content to your site. So instead of adding 100 new Policy pages one at a time, use the Import tool to perform a quick bulk upload. Our recorded training covers this topic, and there's also a wealth of information (including the blank upload spreadsheet) available in the policyIQ Help guide. But you still might benefit from a quick chat with the support team before you get started. They have a number of tips and tricks they can share that will make your import run smoothly, and they'd even be willing to proofread your import spreadsheet.

So what's the best way to contact policyIQ support?

The quickest and best way to contact the support team is through your policyIQ Help guide. Just click on "Help" in the top right corner of any screen. When the Help window opens, click on the Submit a Support Question link.

When the Submit a Support Window opens, it will be pre-populated with some information about you.

Fill in some more details for us, such as a title for your question and some details about the issue you're contacting us about. Be sure to provide as many details as you can.

Where were you in your policyIQ site?
What were the series of clicks you followed to get to that point?
How was your issue different from your expected result?

With this information, we'll be able to more quickly pinpoint your issue and start troubleshooting!

Once you've done that, a member of the support team will get back in touch with you in short order.

Can I call?

Absolutely! The policyIQ support team is available to take your calls between 8 am and 8 pm ET, Monday - Friday. Just give us a call on our toll-free number: 1-866-753-1231.

And finally, don't forget that you can also email us at any time at support@policyIQ.com.

We're all working to be "great communicators"

2010-08-03T21:05:00Z

What is the policyIQ Team up to in August?

Well, we thought that we ought to take a few moments to take an inventory of our solutions, features and services and to focus on communication. policyIQ’s founder noted its importance in his Effective Policy Management White Paper .

As one of the six basic steps of the Policy Management Process, the policyIQ team has kept communication as one of our key areas of focus for development over the years.

We’ll share with you, this month, how important it is to us to help you communicate key information and updates to your employees. We’ll remind you of some old features that you may not be using optimally, share some tips on how to make the most of workflow features that relate to communication, and present a couple of new or, at least improved, policyIQ solutions that hinge on powerful communication features.

Of course, we also want to be sure that you know all of the ways that you can communicate with us! You know that you can reach us at support@policyIQ.com; we'll also share some other tips with you about sharing information with the policyIQ team this month.

So, stay tuned to the policyIQ Blog in August and be sure to sign up for our online CPE web session scheduled on Thursday, August 26, 2010 at noon Eastern Time (9am PDT): Contract Management: policyIQ Custom Notifications Opens New Doors.

Highlights from recent webinar: Using policyIQ for Account Reconciliations!

2010-08-02T14:18:00Z

We'd like to offer a big thanks to everyone who attended our recent policyIQ solution-focused training session on using policyIQ to manage a monthly Account Reconciliation process. And special thanks to our co-presenter, Patrick Griffiths from Sirva, Inc. Patrick shared his experience and some of the insights he's gained from implementing a global Account Reconciliation process at SIRVA.

SIRVA's story

SIRVA has multiple divisions globally and a strong internal control structure. Within this setting, Patrick set out to provide better control and visibility around the Account Reconciliation process. As Patrick emphasized during the presentation, "The timely completion and review of Account Reconciliations is your strongest and best financial control." As a long-time policyIQ user, Patrick believed the Forms Management feature would help SIRVA manage their Account Reconciliations more efficiently and provide a level of oversight few organizations have.

Goals and Benefits

Heading into his Account Reconciliation implementation, Patrick had identified the following goals, which will likely be familiar to anyone currently working with a manual Account Reconciliation process:

Insure that all Account Reconciliations are completed timely.
Provide a method for documented approvals of Account Reconciliations.
Provide all levels of Management visibility into the Account Reconciliation process.

Like many of our clients who are using policyIQ's Forms Management feature to automate their manual processes, SIRVA has recognized some key benefits:

Reconcilers have visibility to the Account Reconciliations they need to complete.
Clearly indicated due dates.
Electronic submissions and approvals.
Reporting and electronic storage of approved Account Reconciliations.
Shift from manual auditing to continuous auditing.
Unprecedented level of oversight for all levels of management

Patrick answered a number of questions from our curious attendees. He has also taken the time to answer some additional questions below:

Question:

How many people were involved in developing the roll-out of this functionality and then in the maintenance?

Patrick Responds:

Initially I planned and rolled out the pilot to Asia myself but then with the other global divisions I worked closely with the respective controllers to set up their system. I had two training decks, one for administrators and another for users. Each of our divisions has different abilities and resources, so we tailored our approach with each.

For continuing administration there are normal monthly tasks to roll over the recons, and then there are the other support type issues. Originally I handled everything myself but worked to hand off the monthly administration to the businesses (work in progress.) For general support, we leveraged our financial support team to absorb these tasks. They are approved to add an additional FTE if needed, but presently we have been able to manage with the folks we have. We use an automated helpdesk ticket system to keep track of requests which helps a lot.

For larger issues we rely on policyIQ support; they have been great. I contact them myself to limit the traffic to them and coordinate the requests.

Question:

Is it possible to feed accounts balances from individual reconciliations into another reconciliation?

Patrick Responds:

This is not a feature in policyIQ, but it is really not something that I want. Do to the nature of an account reconciliation, I want the preparer to enter all numbers themselves to have better accountability to what is being submitted. This goes to the issue about uploading G/L balances to the recons. I also do not want to do this because I want the preparer to look at the G/L and enter the current balance. If they rely on the uploaded number, it may not be the most current.

Question:

How does SIRVA address changes? Some users will issue a "corrected reconciliation" form if there are changes after approval has already been granted.

Patrick Responds:

We do the same thing. We will push out a new reconciliation for the revised account to the preparer. If we do not have a need to see the previous approved recon, we assign it to a folder labeled "Misapproved recons"; we set up the security around this folder to only allow admins to see it.

Question:

Can a reconcilation have more than one account per report?

Patrick Responds:

Yes, but it is up to you to decide what you want to have included on a single reconciliation. Generally though, we stick to the one account, one recon rule. There are situations where we do include multiple accounts on a single recon like fixed asset accounts, or intercompany accounts. In these situations, we list out all of the account numbers in the recon so we can keep track of what accounts are being reconciled.

If you missed the session, you can view the recording by clicking here. We've also prepared some materials for you to review in your policyIQ Help Guide.

If you would like to speak with a member of the policyIQ team about using policyIQ to manage your Account Reconciliation work, please contact us at support@policyIQ.com. We'd be happy to work with you and help you better utilize policyIQ!

Spotlight on Forsythe Technology, Inc.'s policyIQ Implementation

2010-07-27T13:02:00Z

policyIQ team members often get questions about the process involved in implementing policyIQ for a new use and how long such an implementation might take. Our answer is always, “It depends”. It depends on how much of the process that takes place outside of policyIQ needs to be developed, the resources available to devote to the implementation and the alignment of the new implementation with the execution of competing projects. To help address this question, we thought that we’d provide a real life example…

April 30th
Jim Blickendorf, the Director of Accounting Operations at Forsythe Technology, Inc., made the decision to purchase policyIQ for Account Reconciliations in April of this year and shortly thereafter, he appointed Senior Business Analyst, Rae Muranski, to oversee the implementation of policyIQ.

May 4th
Rae hit the ground running; scheduling a planning and configuration meeting with her policyIQ implementation partner. Rae took some time to learn how policyIQ works for Account Reconciliations and made a point to review Forsythe’s Account Reconciliation process. This was the ideal time to refine their process and to implement best practices going forward. Rae made decisions about which variables would be most valuable for her organization to track going forward. She considered who would be involved in the process and what their responsibilities would be.

May 11th
After mapping out her wishes, Rae determined the implementation path that would best accommodate Forsythe’s needs—that is, whether to go with a single Form Template or multiple Form Templates (broken down by approver). For more information on what goes into this decision, check out our recent blog post: Account Reconciliations: One Form Template or Multiple? Upon reviewing the options, Rae determined that Forsythe would benefit by the reporting advantages of developing their Account Reconciliation List Templates based on a single Form Template.

June 3rd
Forsythe has a few hundred balance sheet accounts to reconcile on a monthly basis. Rather than building each of the Form List Templates with specific account data for each account manually, she engaged the services of the policyIQ Support Team to add these Customized List Templates directly into the database. Rae also took advantage of her ability to import users rather than adding each one manually. Because Rae utilized the services of the policyIQ Help Desk to import her List Templates, she was able to designate the preparer and the approvers (which she previously imported) as a part of the List Templates creation process carried out by the policyIQ Support team.

June 25th
Rae moved on to exercising the assignment of reconciliations to preparers, developing a solid understanding of the features available to Form Template Administrators. She then proceeded to explore the reporting options available to her.

So, in less than 60 days, Rae Muranski performed a complete sweep of her organization’s Account Reconciliation process, refining the process and incorporating best practices in the process while learning how to use a new application and to apply that tool to bring automation and powerful oversight capability to the Account Reconciliation process.

Wow! That’s impressive!

Automate your annual corporate policy sign-offs!

2010-07-22T12:44:00Z

In May of this year, we talked about how policyIQ can be configured to manage a corporate policy sign-off process. Since we're celebrating the "Forms of July" this month, we'd like to give an overview of this process and explain how policyIQ can help you simplify your current work and realize specific gains.

If your organization is like many, your employees are required to read a handful of corporate policies on an annual basis and also indicate their agreement to abide by those policies. In many cases, someone in HR will need to send out a blast email pointing employees to the corporate policies. But how do you then gather the employee agreements? Perhaps the employees download a sign-off form, print it out, pencil in some answers and then route it back to HR. That process will work, but it's error-prone, non-secure, and certainly not very green!

Save time, reduce errors and minimize your paper usage!

policyIQ provides a great solution for automating this process and cutting down on the possibilities for errors. Using policyIQ Forms:

You can create a sign-off form that includes the exact language you want your employees to agree to (the sign-off statement).
Your users can access their sign-off forms simply by logging into policyIQ. There's never any risk that they'll be accessing an outdated form. Their sign-off forms will be waiting for them on their policyIQ Dashboard, so there's no other navigating required.
On each sign-off form, you have the option to display the related policy in the body of the form, ensuring that your employees have the information right in front of them as they indicate their compliance.

Once your employees submit their forms, you have a permanent record of their responses. policyIQ reporting makes it easy to review all answers of a certain type - e.g., which employees indicated that they do not agree to abide by a particular policy? You can get this kind of information in a matter of seconds, as opposed to browsing files or thumbing through papers.

Do you have dozens of these sign-off forms to distribute to hundreds of employees? Large-scale processes like this are simple in policyIQ. Our Form List feature makes it really easy to bundle all of your forms together in one list and distribute them to all employees on a specified date.

Managing your sign-off process from year to year is also very easy. Simply make a copy of last year's list, make any necessary adjustments, and run the new list!

If you'd like to learn more about implementing your own annual policy sign-off process in policyIQ, contact your account manager at support@policyIQ.com. We'd be happy to demonstrate this feature and help you get your process up and running!

Forms Reporting: Review the responses you’ve received—or see what is outstanding—with the click of a button!

2010-07-20T15:57:00Z

The policyIQ team is spending some time examining and sharing information on our Forms functionality in the month of July. We’ve talked to you about how some clients are using policyIQ to gather monthly Account Reconciliations, Control Self Assessments, Corporate Policy Sign-offs, System Access Requests and more. It’s one thing to have a system or platform for gathering this information and something much more exciting and useful to have a mechanism for easily pulling information back out again and being able to review, analyze and interpret the results of your employees’ responses.

Let’s look at what you have at your policyIQ fingertips…

Go to your Dashboard: We all know that the Dashboard contains quick links that take us to our areas of responsibility (i.e. Pages Checked Out To Me) or to our areas of interest (Blogs or Favorites). Did you know that you can add a window pane to your Dashboard for Forms To Approve? If you’re an Approver of Forms, with one click, you can easily see and review the Forms that have been submitted to your attention from your Dashboard.

Check out Activities: If you want to see a full breakdown of the Forms that remain Open, those that have been Submitted and those that have been Approved, Administrators and Approvers can easily review this information in the Forms’ Activities area. The Activities table is great because it provides data similar to what you get from a Summary Report and you don’t have to go to the Reports module to create it!

Look in your Folders: Okay…this one might be two clicks: The Administrators of your Forms have the ability to direct approved form responses to designated Folders so that they may be easily viewed by selected viewers. Do you want your external auditors to have access to your 302 certification responses? Create a Folder for 302 Responses and list the “External Auditors” group among the permitted Viewers. You can specify these Folders and Viewers when creating your 302 Certification Form Template and Form Lists. Once logged into policyIQ, your external auditors can click on the appropriate Folder (perhaps they have saved it in their “Favorite Folders”) and then click on the Form of their choice in the list to see the responses within the Form.

Reporting on the Status of Responses

Administrators of Form Templates and Form Lists can create reports that allow them to verify the status of Form Responses. Here are some examples of Status related reports that you can create:

Want to know who has responded to quarterly certifications in 2010?
You can narrow down to just those who have responded to Q2 certifications, if you’d like.
Interested in following up on a particular individual?
Are you responsible for getting a reminder out to employees who havent yet responded to the annual corporate policy sign-off?
Maybe you need to alert the Compliance Officer’s back up that forms have been submitted and are awaiting approval in the Compliance Officer’s vacation absence.

If you wish to access any of this information on a regular basis (i.e. monthly, quarterly, etc), then you can add your Report to your Favorites; granting you truly one-click access from your policyIQ Dashboard.

If you want more specific guidance on how to create a Status Report, look to the Forms Reports manual within your Help guide online in policyIQ:

Reporting on the Details within Users’ Responses

Reports can also aid Approvers and specified Viewers in analyzing Form Responses. By using filters, such as filters for Form Templates or filters on Fields within Templates, an Approver can create actionable results like those listed below:

Create a list of users who responded negatively to a certification or a satisfaction survey.
Do you want to follow up on those that said that they agree with the assertion, yet included a comment to qualify their responses?
Do you want to see which accounts reported unreconciled balances in the previous month?
Which process owners reported that procedures had changed and the process is now different than in the previous quarter?

Each of these reports listed above is likely one that an approver or authorized viewer would want to review on a regular basis—definitely good candidates for adding to Favorite Reports and accessing in one click from the Dashboard.

In addition to following the guidance provided in Help, users can contact Support@policyIQ.com to request assistance in creating reports such as those highlighted above.

Control Self-Assessments: Let us make it easier!

2010-07-16T14:04:00Z

My favorite part of my job comes when I can help someone take a cumbersome process and simplify it using policyIQ. Knowing that I've just saved someone time in their busy day (or prevented a migraine caused by extreme frustration) puts a smile on my face.

For that reason, when I work with any client who is using policyIQ to track internal controls, I want to learn about their process for gathering self-assessments from their control owners for those controls.

Why perform Control Self-Assessments?

Most organizations tracking Internal Controls have some process in place for collecting an assessment of the control from the control owner. Who better than the person who performs the control to tell you:

Is the control currently documented correctly (as it is actually performed)?
Is the control designed in a way that effectively mitigates the risk?
Is the control operating effectively?
Is the control efficient? Is there a better way to mitigate that risk?

Okay - so very few organizations are asking that last question - but why not? If you are already reaching out to control owners, why not take the opportunity to find out if there are better ideas out there? And if your control owners are given an opportunity to offer their "better" suggestions and have a sense of ownership over their duties, they are less likely to complain about the process. (At least, they are less likely to complain out loud.)

What does your Control Self-Assessment process look like?

If you are currently doing Control Self-Assessments, what does your process look like? Does it involve a spreadsheet and email? Are there reports to be run in advance, worksheets to be compiled for each control owner, and emails to be sent out?

Do you find yourself spending hours trying to track people down to get those spreadsheets back? Are you combing through your email Folders to figure where you accidentally misfiled that response from the CFO, because you know you received it but now you can't find it and you REALLY don't want to tell her that you lost her email?

Are you then recompiling a hundred or more responses into a new spreadsheet and making updates to your final documentation in policyIQ?

Are you repeating this hassle every quarter, feeling like you've barely finished the last round when the new round of self-assessments need to be sent out? Or are you skipping it and doing it less frequently than you'd like, just because it's too much work.

STOP! We have a better way.

policyIQ Forms offer a really terrific solution for Control Self-Assessments, allowing you to create a List of Forms that gets sent out to Control Owners on your preferred frequency asking them to review the most current control documentation (already in policyIQ and linked to their forms). The process solves a number of headaches for you:

You don't have to create a report and send something out of policyIQ to the Control Owner. You are asking them to log in and review the most current information in your primary system of record. (Time saved and errors avoided!)
Easily track who has responded and who has not. Send email reminders to those who still must submit their responses!
Reporting lets you easily narrow down which responses you must review and act on - such as ONLY those responses where changes must be made or on which the Control Owner has indicated an ineffective design or operation.
You'll never "lose" a response. Everything is submitted within policyIQ - and will be retained for reporting and audit purposes alongside all other internal control and testing information.

Get started with a better Control Self-Assessment process today!

Convinced? Fired up? Ready to go? If you are like most organizations, your third quarter of the year has just started on July 1^st, so you have lots of time to put a new plan in place for Q3 Self-Assessments! (Want to do Q2 Self-Assessments? Stop reading and call us right now - we'll get you started.)

We can't lie - setting up a new Control Self-Assessment Form List can take some time. Our recommended setup is to create a Form List with a Form customized for every Control that should have a self-assessment completed. The "customization" means linking the Form to the Control Page in policyIQ, assigning it to the appropriate Control Owner, and editing the name to reflect the Control in question.

But after that initial setup, the process practically runs itself - and the time you save just within the first Control Self-Assessment cycle will make it worthwhile! Once set up, you simply copy your work from last quarter, make any adjustments that you need to for new Controls or changes in Control Owner. If the Control details have changed, you don't have to worry about it. You've already made the updates in policyIQ - and your Control Owners will be looking at the most recent documentation!

Your online policyIQ Help has detailed step-by-step instructions on how to set up your Form Template, Form List and Forms for Control Self-Assessments. Follow the navigation displayed below - or just click on the image to launch into the Help page on this topic!

Questions? Want to talk about other ways to customize the process? Contact us at support@policyIQ.com and we'd be happy to discuss it!