Auditboard is especially useful for SOX control testing. It is very convenient having all our information on a single platform. It is easy to communicate PBC requests to clients, store control testing working papers for review, communicate deficiencies and build dashboards to provide visual statistics. Situations where it might not be useful are for organizations that are smaller in size where the templates don't fit well with their internal audit/controls program. There is a significant amount of testing required before using the platform, and adapting working papers to fit in well with AuditBoard
As an financial and consulting working professional we had many challenges related to being compliant with other financial and governmental regulations and standard. For that we need so many different process, business units and other interested parties to come on same table and work on every single control to get compliant with those regulations. In this case we have manage so many risks and work on timely remediation. Onspring worked well in this.
We used to perform our Risk Control Analysis (RCA) for each audit's planning in an Excel spreadsheet. Once we purchased the Risk Oversight module, AuditBoard helped us convert the RCA to a system function rather than a spreadsheet. At first, we lost some of the functionality the spreadsheet provided, but AuditBoard did continue to help us build and work towards a solution more similar to what we previously had. Though happy with it, it's still not perfect. As one example, I'd like to be able to link actual Ops Audit work steps that cover the risk and controls being outlined in the RCA, rather than just adding a comment to state which steps cover them. More of a preference, I suppose.
I also had demoed their beta Resources and Scheduling module, but it didn't have enough functionality at the time to work for how we put the quarterly Internal Audit schedule together (using Excel). One thing I recall was that you couldn't pull in SOX controls or non-chargeable work (such as education or administration) to auditor's schedules; it was meant to schedule the Ops Audits only. It is possible they have already fixed or improved this; I just haven't seen the updated version.
I remember there were a lot of sync issues when I used the internally developed software, but that's probably because a few people were working on the same project at the same time. I have not come across this issue in AuditBoard
RSA Archer is also great tool but why I choose Onspring is because it is user friendly and easy UI on the other hand Archer is so lethal and complex system which sometimes lack behind in term performance and scalability.
Hard to quantify. It was cheaper than the tool we had and we were able to get rid of standalone tool for surveys. overall, just better user experience for all.