Planning For Your First SOC Report: A Compact Playbook

Prepare with Confidence.  Comply with Clarity.

If you’re pursuing a new SOC report, the fastest path to a clean audit report opinion is being prepared. Here’s a concise, auditor-aligned approach that reduces waste and keeps your team focused on what really matters. 

At Alpha Secure, we can help you in your SOC report journey to become prepared for your first SOC audit with our rapid SOC gap and readiness assessment.  Alpha Secure can help you perform some, or all of the SOC report readiness activities listed to help you get your first clean SOC report quickly and without complexity.

1. Define the Scope, System Description, and Stakeholder Alignment

Decide what’s in-scope before you do anything else.

• System description: Document your service, applications, system boundaries, data flows, and any subservice organizations (and whether you plan the audit to be inclusive of these sub-service providers or carved-out).

• AICPA Trust Services Criteria (TSC) in-scope: Select the key criteria to be included in the audit and map them to your assets and key vendors.

  • Security (minimum a for SOC 2), Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy.

• Ownership: Select your project leader (sponsor) and start documenting the control owners for each of your controls based on the TSCs in-scope; publish a simple RACI.

• Planning memorandum: One-page scope brief to summarize the previous points, with addendums to support your current data flow diagram and in-scope application inventory.

Why it saves time: Prevents scope-creep, establishes accountability, and reduces audit planning time.

2. Find Control Gaps Early—and Close Them

Do a readiness gap assessment of your internal controls against the applicable TSC criteria before any audit fieldwork.

• Define your controls: Create a control matrix, that includes your internal controls that satisfy the trust services criteria in-scope for the SOC report.

• Gap assessment: Determine any existing control deficiencies, their severity, the control owner, remediation target date, and the exact artifacts that will prove both control design and operating effectiveness.

• Dates of control operation: Ensure remediated (fixed) controls operate for a meaningful portion of the Type 2 period, typically 6 months or more.

• If timing is tight: Define compensating activities and plan transparent disclosures, or work with your auditor on a shorter initial window to demonstrate operating effectiveness.

  • Tip:  A Type 1 report, that only assess control design and implementation as of a point in time, can be a great way to demonstrate SOC progress quickly.

Why it saves time: Stops cascading exceptions and emergency fixes during the audit window, while greatly increasing the likelihood of a clean SOC audit.

3. Validate Your Controls Proactively

Perform a dry-run of the audit procedures yourself.

• Define your audit populations: Use system-generated reports; retain filters, parameters, and timestamps for completeness & accuracy.

• Sampling: Select a sample from your population over period, and how you selected your sample (e.g., random or judgmental).

  • If you can’t recreate your sample, neither can your auditor.

• Documentation: For each control, document your testing and results: objective, frequency, owner, evidence locations, sampling approach, how controls were tested, and how exceptions were handled.

Why it saves time: Shortens SOC audit planning, testing, and evidence gathering time.

Quick-Start Checklist

• Confirm scoping (TSC categories), and your subservice organization approach.

• Publish a current system description and data flow diagram.

• Map your internal controls to the SOC report TSC criteria and identify control owners.

• Build a gap register with remediation timelines and data artifacts to evidence the controls.

• Produce audit friendly data and population exports and document your own sampling logic (if validating controls first internally).

• Organize a labeled documentation list and folder that mirrors your control list.

Bottom line: A clearly defined scope, early SOC control gap closure, and internal audit-style controls validation turn your SOC readiness approach from a scramble into a streamlined project—yielding fewer surprises, predictable timelines, and a clean SOC report. 

If you have questions or need help preparing for your first SOC audit, reach out to us at contact@goalphasec.com and we will help you on your SOC readiness journey.