Overview
When working on a SOC 1 and SOC 2 for the same client, you’ll find that many controls and related data are repeated across your sheets. In this tutorial, you’ll set up a combined engagement using Fieldguide’s automation features to streamline your workflow. It assumes you have already:
Learned how to add an engagement
Learned how to add a sheet to an engagement, rename it, add and delete columns, and automatically add the client’s controls
Added your client’s controls to the controls library, and learned how to add tags to controls
By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to:
Set up a combined SOC 1 and SOC 2 engagement for a client
Link data across sheets using shared columns
The steps in this tutorial can be applied to other multi-framework engagements.
Background
Fieldguide allows you to link sheets with related data to save you from the trouble of manually entering repeated data. This is most commonly done when you have multiple sheets that have some of the same controls on both sheets. We recommend using this feature when performing a combined SOC 1 and SOC 2 engagement.
Before you begin
You should be set as a firm admin in Fieldguide, or have a system permission which allows you to create sheets
Your client should be added to Fieldguide under the Clients menu
Your controls for this engagement should be added to the client’s library with the appropriate mappings and tagged with the word “SOC”
Set up a new Engagement
To start, add a new engagement for the client.
Choose the option to Create from Scratch.
Don’t select a sheet template.
Check the box to automatically add this company’s controls to the sheet.
Select the tag “SOC”.
Create a Control Testing Sheet
After creating your engagement, rename your default sheet to Control Testing. Your Control Testing sheet contains a flat list of all the controls that will be used in this engagement, along with any related data that you want to reference in your SOC audits. We recommend adding your Tests of Control and Results columns to this sheet.
Add your SOC Sheets
Add two new sheets to your Engagement: SOC 1 and SOC 2.
You should create these sheets from your templates
Check the box to automatically add this company’s controls and select the appropriate framework from the dropdown
Link your Sheets
Now you’ll want to link the columns from your Control Testing sheet to your SOC 1 and SOC 2 sheets. Perform the steps below on each of your SOC sheets.
Click the + button in your sheet header.
Select Add column.
Set the column type to Shared columns.
Select your Control Testing sheet from the menu.
The Shared Columns box shows you which columns from your Control Testing sheet will be added to your SOC sheet. You can leave this as the default setting, which is to add all the columns.
Click Add Columns.
Add the columns to your SOC 1 and SOC 2 sheets, not to your Control Testing sheet. Be careful not to do it the other way around!
You can see the shared columns that were added to your SOC sheet in your sheet’s column header. Any columns that have been added from the Control Testing sheet will say Control Testing in the header.
Any data you add to cells in a shared column will sync to any other sheet where that column exists.
Next, link your Documents and Requests columns from the Control Testing sheet to your SOC 1 and SOC 2 sheets by clicking the link icon in the column headers.
Remove unneeded columns
If extra versions of the columns on your Control Testing sheet also exist on your SOC 1 or SOC 2 sheets, we recommend keeping the version from Control Testing and deleting the version on your other sheet.
For example, you should remove the version of “Sign offs” from your SOC 2 sheet that isn’t linked from the Control Testing sheet. Now you only need to add your sign off once per control and it will sync across all your sheets in the engagement.
Summary
In this tutorial, you learned how to:
Set up a combined SOC 1 and SOC 2 engagement
Use shared columns in sheets to save time on repeating sign offs and other data
Now that you’ve set up your sheets and shared columns, you can begin to work your engagement.
Next steps
Consider following these guides to learn about working your engagement and using additional time-saving features in Fieldguide: