As we shine the spotlight on some of the lesser known policyIQ features, we want to show you how policyIQ’s Summary Reports help to simplify your oversight and analysis tasks and make decision-making much easier, too!  You might be familiar with these quantitative reports, but have you explored them to their full potential?  Do you need to know the status of compliance testing?  We can do that.  Contracts by type and region?  Covered.  “Heat Maps” illustrating issues by department and location?  Done.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you might use these reports in your policyIQ application.

Status Reports

It doesn’t matter what you are managing in policyIQ, you are likely to have someone responsible for oversight into the status of the documentation.  It might be something formal like compliance testing – or it might be more informal, such as checking in on whether procedure documents are in draft or published.

Do you need to know the answer to any of these questions?

• What is the status of our audit testing?
• Do all departments have their policies and procedures published and complete?
• Where are the issues in my organization, and what is the status of issue resolution?

Assignments and Distribution of Work

Did you know that you can create a “Summary Report” that will list out all of the individuals to whom a page is checked out – and summarize their assigned work by any other factor you choose?

• Who is working on the tasks in my team, and what is the status of those tasks?
• Who is responsible for open remediation items, and what is the severity of those open items?

“Heat Maps”  Identify your Hot Spots

Clients often ask if policyIQ has “heat maps” to show where problem areas exist in the organization.  We give you a qualified “yes”: the term “heat map” typically applies to a report with color coding to show problem areas.  We don’t have that color coding, but a summary report provides the same functionality (with bonus quantitative results and drill down capability).

• How many deficiencies have been identified in our compliance program and what processes have the most severe deficiencies?
• Where is the risk in our business, and what processes or departments have been identified as the highest overall risk?

Improve your Internal Control Environment

It’s no secret that Internal Risks and Controls is one of the most common uses of policyIQ – and there are a slew of ways that summary reports can improve your oversight of that environment.  We’ll leave out the obvious testing and deficiency reports (because we’ve mentioned those above).  How about these other questions you may struggle to answer?

• Are we over or under controlled in any one process?
• How many of our controls in each business process are preventive versus detective?
• Are all of our controls manual? Do we have automated controls in all processes?
• Do we have controls that meet all of our assertions (financial statement assertions, COSO objectives, etc) in every business process?

It’s not magic.  But it’s also not rocket science.

policyIQ is incredibly powerful – but it’s not magic.  (No matter how many times we make our developers read the Harry Potter series, policyIQ is still stuck in Muggle-mode.)  If you want to be able to answer the questions above, you do need to be sure that policyIQ is capturing the necessary pieces of information.  For instance, if you want to be able to report on the tasks or responsibilities of your team, your team does need to be keeping their status updated in policyIQ.   But knowing what questions you want to answer – and that policyIQ can provide those answers – is half the battle.  Contact us and let us get you the rest of the way there by helping you to add Fields or Templates if necessary, and building those Summary Reports!