Fully automated SOC 2 evidence collection sounds great until you try it. Half the items need human judgment. Here is how a three-phase guided workflow at Tallyfy collected 99 evidence items across 4 sessions in 4 days, with AI handling orchestration and a human handling the judgment calls.
GRC platforms like Vanta and Drata solved the organization problem for compliance teams. But AI solves that same problem and does the actual compliance work too. The value proposition for platforms costing tens of thousands annually is eroding fast when AI can collect 99 of 123 evidence items in four sessions.
Your SOC 2 compliance repository is where the real work happens. Google Drive is the read-only mirror where auditors browse evidence for 67 controls and 31 policies without touching your source of truth.
SOC 2 is not a certification. It is an attestation report issued by a licensed CPA firm expressing a professional opinion about your controls under AICPA standards. Calling it a certification on your website or in sales materials is not just wrong, it can create real legal exposure for your company.
SOC 2 controls do not map one-to-one with evidence items under the AICPA framework. A single control might need three pieces of evidence, and one evidence item might satisfy four controls. Managing these many-to-many relationships in spreadsheets is how compliance programs break down.
SOC 2 is not a certification. It is an AICPA attestation report issued by a licensed CPA firm expressing an opinion about your controls. Most vendor websites, sales decks, and even compliance platforms get this basic fact wrong, and the confusion costs companies real time and money.
Evidence collection is the real bottleneck in SOC 2 Type 2 audits. At Tallyfy, an AI-assisted process with Playwright browser automation collected 99 evidence items across 4 sessions, using date-first naming conventions and typed evidence categories instead of expensive compliance platforms.
SOC 2 evidence collection is not intellectually hard. It is tedious, repetitive, and error-prone when done by hand. A Coalfire report found 60 percent of organizations still manage compliance with spreadsheets. The real cost is the organizational overhead of naming, tracking, and chasing sign-offs across 123 evidence items.
If you already have SOC 2 Type 2, you have done roughly 60-70% of the work needed for HIPAA compliance. The overlap in access controls, encryption, audit logging, and incident response is large. Here is where the frameworks share ground and what HIPAA adds that SOC 2 does not address.
Most companies pay five figures annually for penetration testing they could run themselves. Open-source scanners like Nuclei, testssl.sh, and nmap cover the OWASP Top 10, generate auditor-ready reports, and run monthly on a cron job for zero cost.
Word documents fail at compliance. We manage 31 SOC 2 policies as markdown files in a Git repository with YAML frontmatter, automated version bumps, and WeasyPrint PDF generation. The auditors get professional PDFs. We get a sane workflow.
A SOC 2 report follows a standard five-section structure defined by the AICPA. Knowing what belongs in each section helps you catch errors before sharing the report with customers and gives you the vocabulary to push back on your auditor when something looks wrong.
A SOC 2 risk assessment requires every risk to have an ID, description, category, likelihood, impact, and mitigating controls. Most companies track this in sprawling spreadsheets. At Tallyfy, we maintain 42 risks in structured YAML files that satisfy the AICPA Trust Services Criteria.
SOC 2 Type 1 proves your controls exist on paper. Type 2 proves they actually worked over months of real operation under AICPA standards. Most enterprise buyers demand Type 2, and the evidence collection grind is where AI-assisted automation delivers real returns.
Not every vendor will hand over their SOC 2 report. Some gate it behind enterprise tiers, some do not have one, and some just ignore the request. Your auditor still expects you to manage vendor risk. Here is the workaround that actually satisfies the CC9.2 criteria.
US buyers want SOC 2 from the AICPA. European buyers want ISO 27001. The two frameworks share roughly 80% control overlap, but which one to pursue first depends on where your revenue comes from right now.
SOC 2 compliance platforms charge thousands annually for what is essentially organisation software. We moved to a Git repository, Google Drive for auditor access, and AI for the tedious work. The only cheque we write now goes to our CPA firm for the actual audit.
Your auditor does not care about Anthropic marketing promises or vendor certifications alone. They need evidence of YOUR controls around Claude Code, data handling documentation, and audit trails that prove your AI coding tool is not creating compliance gaps in your SOC 2 framework. IBM found 97% of AI-breached organizations lacked proper access controls.