FEATURES

• Organizational Structure Management: APEX Allows you to customize the organizational structure, both of the Auditing organization, as well as that of the auditee. The Organizational Structure of the Auditee can be categorized as Departments, Projects, Processes and more..

• Audit Staff Management: Once you define your organizational structure, you can start adding audit staff members to the structure. Associated data like number of years of experience, area of expertise (IT Audit, Safety Audit etc.) and even a photograph can be added. All of this data will be useful while performing staff allocation to Audits.

• (Audit Entity) Management: Allowing the audit department to organize Auditees and Auditee files is an essential feature of any Audit Management System. APEX allows you to work with a hierarchical structure for your auditees. Whether Internal Audit or External, APEX Audit System' Auditee module is flexible enough to accommodate your needs. You can create several Audit Entity Types like Company, Ministry (in case of government audit), Department, Process, Project or System and link them to each other.

• Risk Assessment: Your organization may or may not have moved yet to risk based auditing. But in either case, APEX provides you with a way to manage the Risks of your Auditees. Use these risks to create risk based audits, or use the inbuilt audit programs to perform conventional audits, or a combination of both!

• Prioritization: You can prioritize Auditees based on Risk or on other configurable parameters inbuilt into the system. Audit Software include prioritization so that you can focus your efforts - and limited resources - on areas of highest priority.

• Plan Generation: Once the system contains Auditees and Audit Staff, you can generate an Audit Plan for any given period. Include Auditees, Auditors and create teams to perform Audits. A color coded Gantt interface helps you in planning and immediately tells you of the status of the ongoing audits.

• Generation of Work Orders: Work orders can be generated to ensure that no duplication of work is performed. An audit can only commence when a work order is generated and assigned to the individual auditors of the audit team.

• Updating of Audit Status: Audit Status can be easily updated and will immediately reflect in all reports for that audit and the audit plan that contains it.

• Audit Programs: APEX provides you with a number of useful audit programs built in. For example: IT Audit, Cash and Bank, Procurement etc. And literally hundreds of Audit Programs can be provided to the user as an add on option.

• Audit Work Breakdown (Audit Task Assignment): Managing Audit Work Breakdown is one of the most crucial tasks of any audit software. And APEX ensures that viewing the status of your tasks, updating the status and assignment/reassignment of tasks is very easy. The user interface is designed to convey useful information in an easy to read manner. APEX uses uniform color-coding and standardized icons to ensure that once you are familiar with the system, every pixel on the screen conveys useful information to you.

• Management of Findings, Follow-ups and Recommendations: When you begin Audit of an Organization or process or project, APEX presents to you a list of previous findings, resolved and unresolved. These findings and management responses can be used to plan out the forthcoming audit.

• View Audit Status: In APEX, current Status of the Audit is instantly available at the fingertips of the management. APEX lets the user drill down into the Audit Status to discover exactly which tasks are complete or delayed and if so, the reason thereof.

• View Staff History (Audits completed in given time frame): For any audit staff member, view the audits completed and update the areas of expertise.

• View Complete Audit History: APEX's reports modules let you view and examine the complete list of audits conducted by a department. Audit Plan progress can be quickly examined.

• View Audit Entity-wise History: For any given audit entity, examine its past audits, list of findings, management responses and recommendations.

• Audit Report and Follow up information: View the audit report online. Audit Reports generated by APEX's audit workpapers module can be viewed on the desktop or downloaded from the APEX server. Follow up information can be quickly reviewed and reassigned if necessary.

• Storage for Work Papers for every Audit: All audits are assigned a separate storage for work papers. A single click "Download Complete Audit File" function enables you to obtain all electronic workpapers and auditee information like risks, controls, audit programs, findings etc. as a single zip file for offline use.

• Collaborative Editing of Work Papers: The entire audit team can simultaneously work on audit workpapers. As soon as a user updates a file, the changes can be seen by the other users.

• Work Paper Versioning: All documents are version controlled and check-in comments are required before a document is submitted. This ensures that there is an audit trail that walks you through each and every change made by an auditor.

• Auditee Archive: Manage all documents related to the Auditee like annual reports, reports of past audits, findings etc.

• Electronic Workpapers: APEX has one of the most advanced and easy to use Electronic Working Paper Systems. Integration with Microsoft Word and Excel ensures that you do not have to go through a large learning curve. All of the documents can be managed from the Web interface too!

• Digitization of Standard forms used in Audit Process: You can include your forms into APEX very easily in the base system. But in case your organization requires those forms to be integrated as the main forms within APEX, that is easily achieved by customization.

• Implementation of Form based Workflow: Complex workflows can be added into APEX Audit System. Routing of forms based on forms data, or infopath integration can be done and will make your forms available within APEX.

• Integration of Forms with Database for Easy Retrieval: Custom forms can be submitted to the database and be made searchable.

• Digital Signatures in Forms for authentication: Digital Signatures can be used to meet legal requirements if applicable in your country.

• User Management: Add/Remove Users, Change Password etc. In case you have an Active Directory (AD) installation, APEX can be quickly customized to start using Windows Authentication using Active Directory, thus making your security more robust.

• Audit Trails: Each and every activity done within APEX is recorded and can be tracked by the System Administrator.

• Backup and Restore: Extremely easy backup and restore methods ensure that your audit data will be safe!

APEX contains powerful collaborative features to increase the productivity of your Audit teams. Whenever an Auditor logs in into the system he/she is redirected to the “My Audits”page which contains a list of all Audits that the Auditor is currently assigned to.

The “My Tasks” page displays a list of currently assigned open tasks for the Auditor.

All audits contain an inbuilt discussion thread where the Audit team members can discuss Audit points before finalizing them. This feature makes communication within the audit team very easy.

Communication between the Management and the Audit Teams is enhanced by the ‘Blog Message’ feature using which Senior Management can disseminate important information to the entire Audit Staff.

APEX Audit System will send email notifications for important events. For example, if an audit is started and the team is assigned, the audit team will receive a message. When a task status changes, APEX will send an email notification to the team leader. Several events can be tracked for notification and are fully configurable.