Solar Panel Solutions Inc. (SPS) is a Canadian public company founded in 2001 that manufactures solar panels. You, CPA, are a senior auditor of CPA LLP, SPS's external auditors. Today is February 14th2020, you met with Andre Leveque, a partner with the firm, to discuss SPS's 2019 year-end audit. The initial planning was completed in October 2019 and the year-end audit is currently underway. CPA LLP will provide SPS with a management letter, Andre would like you to discuss anycontrol weaknessesyou identify with the job-costing program and related processes, along withrecommendationsto improve them. Andres wants you to discussthreecontrol weaknesses by usingWeakness, Implication and Recommendation(WIR)format.

Job-costing software - Cogna

About a year ago, SPS acquired a proprietary job-costing software, Cogna, which tracks budgeted costs, actual costs and billings-to-date. There have been many complaints from the project managers using Cogna, who say the software interface is not intuitive and that they keep finding additional functionality of the software that they were unaware of. The IT manager, Josh, does not understand why this is an issue, as he sent the user guide for Cogna to everyone who would be using it weeks before the software was installed.

Josh and his team have been overworked since the software acquisition, resolving bugs in the software and integrating Cogna into the existing accounting system. Because Cogna only allows for one super-user account, the entire IT team has been using the same login when they need to update the software coding. Josh is now too busy to review every programmer's work. Since he has not found any errors in their work to date, he no longer feels that a review is necessary.

Since SPS acquired Cogna, major changes made to the software include the following:

When a user starts a new project, they must input a project job manually number (created by the project manager) and the customer name.

If the customer had a project with Bright in the past, the details from the previous order are pre-populated into all the fields, including the address, phone number, previous job description and previous budgeted costs.

Project managers use invoices and timesheets as a basis for inputting actual costs incurred into Cogna, so that they can be compared to budgeted information. The actual costs captured in Cogna are automatically transferred to the accounting system and the appropriate journal entry is created and recorded. No one in the accounting department sees the entries.

A new functionality ensures that backups are done automatically every night, with the prior backup being overwritten.