SpoolFlex Gains Audit Trail for Regulatory Compliance

by Alex Woodie

New auditing features from DRV Technologies are helping iSeries shops comply with the record-keeping and disclosure requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and other new regulations. The developer of the SpoolFlex document management software suite recently launched a new product called the Audit Trail that improves administrators' document monitoring capabilities while satisfying the requirements for regulatory compliance.

SpoolFlex is a collection of native OS/400 utilities designed to eliminate the time and expense associated with printing and hand-delivering OS/400 reports, and to reduce errors introduced when financial data is rekeyed into Excel spreadsheets. The basic SpoolFlex e-Delivery Suite provides conversion to popular PC formats such as PDF and Excel, as well as e-mail delivery. The company also offers the SpoolFlex Advanced Utility Suite, which adds capabilities such as report splitting, sorting, and distribution options. Optional modules rounding out the suite include an AFP- or PCL-to-PDF converter, a forms overlay package, and laser check and electronic payment options.

Two weeks ago, the Atlanta company unveiled another add-on product, the SpoolFlex Audit Trail version 1.0. This new component tracks SpoolFlex activity, and lets administrators find out when and where reports were distributed, who sent them, who received them, and what delivery method was used. Users work with the Audit Trail from native 5250 interface, which lets administrators search for documents based on several criteria, including the name of the document itself, the name of the report distribution, date range, recipient, or sender.

In addition to searching for documents, the Audit Trail lets users pull up the documents they have found, view them from their PC, and re-send them or forward them to a new group of users. Users simply type a "V" (for view) directly next to the document they want to pull up, and Audit Trail automatically launches the viewing software, such as Excel or Adobe Acrobat, and opens the document.

Audit Trail can help eliminate the loss of documents and the inefficiencies that result from the human error inherent in filing, says DRV Technologies vice president of sales and marketing, Christopher David. "When I go to file a document, sometimes I do it by the person's name, and sometimes I do it by the company name," he says. "When I go to find a document, I may try to find it by company name. 'Oh, I did file it by the person's name.' Audit Trail can vastly speed up the retrieval process."

One SpoolFlex customer currently using the new Audit Trail capability is CBCA, a healthcare benefits management services company based in Dallas, Texas, that handles $1 billion worth of claims annually. Every month, CBCA distributes thousands of reports by e-mail using the SpoolFlex software. Faced with HIPAA requirements, CBCA needed to ensure accountability in its report distribution system.

CBCA is using the new Audit Trail capability in two ways: to ensure that the e-mail reports are sent out correctly, and to create an archive using the Audit Trail's resending capability. "In addition to providing an e-mail audit trail, this provides us with an archiving tool for the reports electronically filed to our Web server," says Paul Byrd, a programmer with CBCA.

Future releases of Audit Trail will enable SpoolFlex administrators to restrict access to Audit Trail's capabilities, David says.

Audit Trail 1.0 starts at $995 and requires that users have SpoolFlex e-Delivery Suite, which starts at about $2,500. The Advanced Utility suite, which costs about $1,300, is not a requirement to use the Audit Trail.