SOC 2 compliance software: a SOC 2 audit preparation tool with the price on the page

No, and nothing can except an audit. Complies assists with compliance workflows: it is not legal advice, and it does not certify you or guarantee audit outcomes. A SOC 2 report is issued by an accredited CPA firm after an audit. Your auditor decides; Complies gets you ready, with controls mapped, evidence organized, and gaps closed before that audit starts.

Most startups do Type 1 first because a customer deal is waiting on it: it checks control design at a single point in time and is faster to reach. Type 2 observes the same controls operating over 3 to 12 months and carries more weight with security teams. In Complies the control set is the same, so a Type 1 flows into the Type 2 observation window without rework.

Budget the auditor separately: a Type 1 audit typically runs $5,000 to $20,000 in CPA firm fees, and Type 2 usually costs more because of the observation period. Complies Growth is $199 a month billed yearly, $2,388 a year, which covers the readiness side that incumbents like Vanta or Drata quote at roughly $7,500 to $25,000 or more per year.

Anyone quoting a fixed number before seeing your stack is guessing. Complies gives you a readiness score and a ranked gap list on day one, so the timeline becomes a plan you can staff. Teams starting from a reasonable security baseline, SSO in place and infrastructure in AWS, commonly reach Type 1 readiness in 6 to 12 weeks of part-time work.

SOC 2 compliance software maps your internal controls to the AICPA Trust Services Criteria, collects the evidence that those controls operate, and tracks the gaps until you are ready for a CPA firm to examine you. In practice that means an obligation per criterion with an owner and a due date, automated evidence pulls from your cloud and identity providers, policy versioning with acknowledgments, and a readiness view your team and your auditor can both read. It does not perform the audit or issue the report.

SOC 2 audit preparation is four jobs in order: scope the report, close the control gaps, run the evidence, then package it. Decide Type 1 or Type 2 and which Trust Services Categories beyond security you genuinely need. Map every in-scope criterion to a real control with an owner. Operate those controls long enough to have evidence, which for Type 2 means the whole observation window. Then hand the auditor an organized pack rather than a shared drive. Complies tracks all four as dated obligations so nothing is discovered late.

A working SOC 2 audit checklist covers scope decisions, the control set, evidence, and readiness. Concretely: chosen report type and Trust Services Categories, a written system description, an approved policy set, a risk assessment, access control and access reviews, change management, logging and monitoring, incident response, vendor management, security awareness training, and a documented gap list with owners. Our SOC 2 compliance checklist article walks each item with what auditors typically sample.

They are the AICPA criteria your controls are examined against, currently the 2017 Trust Services Criteria with revised points of focus issued in 2022. There are five categories: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Security, delivered through the CC-series common criteria, is in scope for every SOC 2 examination. The other four are optional and you add them because you committed to them contractually or a buyer asked. Each category you add expands the control set and the evidence burden, so scope deliberately.

It depends on which constraint binds you. If budget and speed of purchase matter most, a self-serve platform with published pricing gets you started the same day and avoids a procurement cycle, which is why Complies runs $79 to $499 a month with every framework cross-mapped from Growth. If you want the deepest integration catalog and a large partner auditor network, Vanta and Drata lead there, at quote-only contracts that third-party medians put around $20,000 to $25,000 a year. If you would rather buy the platform and the audit from one vendor, Thoropass is the outlier that does that.

They ask for the report, not a badge. A prospect's security team requests your current SOC 2 report under NDA, because SOC 2 reports are confidential and there is no public registry to check. They read the auditor's opinion, the exceptions in section 4, the complementary user entity controls they would have to operate on their side, and how subservice organizations were handled. If your report is older than a year they will also ask for a bridge letter, which is management's word rather than an audited document.

Name the owner of every control before fieldwork and make sure that person can explain how it works and show the evidence without hunting. Walk each owner through the criteria their control maps to, dry-run the two or three questions an auditor asks about it, and make sure the evidence in the pack is the same evidence they would produce live. Most exceptions come from a control that genuinely operated but nobody could prove on the day. Complies keeps the owner, the criterion, and the evidence on the same record for exactly this reason.

A spreadsheet is a reasonable starting point and a bad system of record. The AICPA publishes the criteria, not a controls list, so any Excel list you download is somebody's interpretation of what satisfies them. Our SOC 2 controls list article sets out the common criteria with a typical control and the evidence an auditor samples for each, which is the part a spreadsheet cannot carry. The reason teams outgrow the spreadsheet is ownership and recurrence: a cell does not chase a quarterly access review.

Yes, and doing them on one control library is meaningfully cheaper than running two programs. Access control, change management, risk assessment, incident response, and vendor management map across both, so SOC 2 work typically pre-fills around 60% of ISO 27001. What does not carry over is the ISO management machinery: scope, Statement of Applicability, internal audit, and management review. Complies includes all five frameworks cross-mapped from Growth at $199 a month, so a second framework is not a second invoice.