Xactly is pushing a paper by Dr. Raymond Panko of the University of Hawaii. The paper highlights risk of the use of spreadsheets in complying with Sarbanes-Oxley.

Remarkably, Xactly is a vendor of automated on-demand sales compensation software. The products aim to completely sidestep the use of spreadsheets.

"Dr. Panko's research confirms what our customers tell us -- that spreadsheets are quite literally a danger for sophisticated corporate financial reporting," said Christopher W. Cabrera, Xactly founder, president and CEO. "Companies of all sizes can mitigate this risk as it pertains to the management of sales incentive compensation data simply by using an automated on-demand solution such as Xactly Incent(TM)."

According to his research, Dr. Panko "spoke independently with experienced spreadsheet auditors in two different companies in the United Kingdom, where certain spreadsheets must be audited by law. Each company audited about three dozen spreadsheets per year. Both said that they had never seen a major spreadsheet that was free of errors. Both also indicated that about five percent of the spreadsheets they audited have very serious errors that would have had major ramifications had they not been caught."

Xactly's Incent suite is used as an internal process control over incentive compensation to minimize the risk of non-compliance in compensation plans. The company argues that spreadsheets do not provide adequate audit trails as required by SOX.

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