Approva Introduces Approva One, Industry's First Complete Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) Suite

RESTON, VA--(Marketwire - March 2, 2010) - Approva® Corporation (www.approva.net), the leader in continuous controls monitoring (CCM) and audit automation software, today announced the launch of a new product suite, Approva One. With the release of this next-generation CCM suite, Approva is the only vendor that offers a complete CCM solution with a single platform that supports the entire business exception management lifecycle for both continuous monitoring and continuous auditing. With this release, organizations will be able to intuitively identify, investigate and respond to business exceptions and anomalies more cost effectively and across a broader set of financial applications and processes than any other CCM solution available on the market. Additional information on the release is available at www.approva.net/one.

"Governance and compliance are no longer a once- or twice-a-year event; they have become an integral part of how companies are run. As finance and audit departments grapple with this new reality they are seeking ways to satisfy their risk management and compliance obligations without strangling productivity to the point that it threatens their competitiveness," said Approva Chief Technology Officer, Steve Elliott. "Approva One enables them to manage this trade-off by providing a single application to automate the way they identify and respond to both operational and compliance risks."

With Approva One, organizations can materially reduce operational costs and lower audit-related expenses. Unlike other CCM solutions that focus narrowly on the needs of a single department or are confined to a specific business process, Approva One offers one platform that is designed and built to serve the needs of finance, audit and IT security professionals with one application that can flag what users are able to do, what they did do and how they did it. No other solution is able to monitor and correlate exceptions across user access, transactions, master data and application configuration settings. These unique capabilities translate into lower costs and greater benefits for customers by automating compliance obligations, identifying and preventing cash leaks from inappropriate payments and fraud, flagging accounting errors such as inappropriate journal entries and employee access to sensitive financial applications.

Integrated Continuous Controls Monitoring and Approva One

Many organizations are faced with a difficult choice. They must tolerate unnecessary fraud, waste and risk because they lack the resources to cost-effectively test and monitor critical controls for all of their financial systems or else they must spend excessive time and effort to manually test controls in support of mandatory compliance obligations and financial audits. Approva One changes this paradigm by providing a single solution that can automatically monitor any application-related control to identify and analyze exceptions that not only have a compliance impact but a business impact and risk exposure as well.

The capabilities of Approva One are already being used across more than 200 of the world's largest organizations to help address the following types of challenges:

-- Lowering procurement costs by flagging purchases that do not take
   advantage of preferred pricing or purchases that circumvent corporate
   policy;
-- Reducing accounting errors requiring manual investigation and
   reconciliation to improve the accuracy and confidence in financial
   reporting;
-- Improving order accuracy and on-time shipments by identifying incomplete
   or inaccurate data that is delaying orders;
-- Reducing risk of inappropriate or incorrect pricing by identifying
   orders with prices that vary from official price list or negotiated
   contract terms;
-- Lowering audit and compliance costs by automating the manual testing of
   key controls and annual audit programs.

"Too little attention has been placed on continuous controls monitoring by chief financial officers, internal auditors and corporate risk management and compliance leaders," said French Caldwell, research vice president at Gartner Inc., a leading analyst firm. "By automating financial controls monitoring, CCM solutions can increase operational efficiency for critical financial processes, reduce fraud and improve financial governance resulting in a substantial return on investment."

New and enhanced features in Approva One include:

    360-Degree View of Exceptions: Rich contextual information enables
    users to quickly investigate each exception by viewing related data and
    exceptions to identify the root cause.

    Correlation of Multiple Control Types: Enhanced correlation
    capabilities enable users to monitor and correlate exceptions across
    multiple types of controls including user access, transactions, master
    data and application configuration settings. This allows users to
    monitor a broader set of processes and applications than any other CCM
    solution.

    Exception Management: New exception management capabilities enable
    users to respond quickly when issues arise by assigning ownership of
    exceptions, remediating issues and tracking follow-up. A new and
    innovative e-mail collaboration feature enables business owners to
    discuss exceptions with any user and document follow-up for audits.
    Users also now have the ability to navigate straight from exceptions in
    Approva One to the underlying data and transactions in the source ERP
    system for rapid remediation.

    Exception Identification: Hundreds of new out-of-the-box rules along
    with associated key performance indicators, risk indicators and
    dashboards perform fine-grained analyses that identify and track the
    most common exceptions across core financial processes. Enhancements to
    rule building and management capabilities enable business users to
    quickly develop and manage rules that monitor new risks without
    learning proprietary scripting languages used by other CCM solutions.

    Risk Scoring & Analytics: New risk scoring capabilities quantify the
    impact of exceptions by both severity of risk and the dollar impact to
    enable users to prioritize their follow-up on the exceptions which
    present the greatest risk. Users can also export data into Excel to
    perform advanced analytics and automate reporting using embedded
    OLAP-based relationships.

    KPIs, Dashboards & Reporting: New reporting and dashboarding
    capabilities enable users to personalize and tailor their data and
    interface to their individual role. A new data browser enables detailed
    reporting and filtering where a data search can be instantly converted
    into a rule. Configurable dashboards and reports also enable customized
    reporting of key exceptions while role-based access to data and reports
    maintains security.

    Audit Trail & Security: Enhanced audit tracking capabilities further
    automate audit-related activities both for internal control assessments
    and external audits. Fine-grained security enables administrators to
    control users' access on each page.

Approva will hold a webcast on March 16th featuring Approva One, which will be generally available at the end of March. For additional information including a video overview of Approva One visit www.approva.net/one or request an Approva sales representative to contact you at http://www.approva.net/requestcall/.

About Approva

Approva® Corporation is the industry-leading provider of continuous controls monitoring software and is the industry standard at Big-4 audit firms. We enable business, finance, IT and audit professionals to identify, manage and prevent business exceptions in order to reduce compliance risk, increase operational efficiency and prevent inappropriate payments. Global companies such as Bayer, DirecTV, Discovery Communications, First Advantage, Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney and T-Mobile rely on Approva to deliver actionable and auditable intelligence of control breakdowns across their business systems, processes and transactions. Approva has certified integrations with Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM and SAP to provide a holistic Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) solution.

For more information, visit http://www.approva.net or call +1-703-956-8300.

Contact Information: For More Information Contact: Chad Giron DBCPR for Approva +1.571.216.4894 approva@dbcpr.com