364 karma · joined February 9, 2019
Google Docs + MS Office has probably figured this out by now, but there's also ton of historical momentum keeping it in use.
As a financial auditor I remember being baffled how people would go out of their way to create paper processes. A spreadsheet that requires confirmation would be printed, signed, stapled to another piece of paper - all so I can remove the staples and scan it to track digitally in our audit software. At least I knew sending them a PDF would come back looking the same...
Another interesting approach is to bring Git like diffs and collaboration to spreadsheets. XLTrails for example https://www.xltrail.com/.
I wish someone could figure out how to make Git work well with spreadsheets. It would really unlock so much collaboration and sharing. I think one of the main reasons you can't just find good well maintained templates for simple tools is because of poor collaboration tools around spreadsheets.
Exceptions are immediately escalated to the audit committee and sometimes end up as a small footnote in the public reports. Most of the time it says "we were unable to collect sufficient evidence" to provide assurance. Almost never "this was done wrong".
It's interesting to see how the second report differed from their first assessment earlier in the year: https://research.nccgroup.com/2021/04/08/public-report-vpn-b...
Most of the findings in the first report were "Fixed".