Travel & Entertainment Expenses Solution Sheet

Sustaining Your Compliance Initiatives

Managing and Monitoring Master Data Controls

Preventing Application Secuirty Control Conflict

Designing SAP User Rolls

AMR Research Alert Article - GRC Landscape, Part 2

Approva Appoints Industry Veteran as CEO

People on the Move

APPOINTMENTS

New CEO at Approva Corporation

PCard Datasheet

Calgary Breakfast Symposium

FCPA Solutions Datasheet

Approva Awarded Fall 2008 SSPA STAR Awards for Service Excellence

Compliance Week GRC Announcements: Approva Releases Certification Manager

Continuous Audit and IT Audit Automation

Increase breadth, depth, and frequency of audits over critical systems and business processes

Approva’s Approach

Approva’s Controls Intelligence Suite provides a continuous auditing solution that automates tasks that many audit teams are performing manually today. Through automation, Approva improves the frequency with which tests are performed and expands the breadth of data tested. Approva automates the testing of system configurations, user access, master data, and transactions across business systems, freeing auditors to spend time investigating true exceptions, not just gathering data.

Key Benefits

Reduced Audit Cost

Save up to 75% of audit testing time over critical systems and business processes. Eliminates the need to re-perform most point in time audit tests because continuous monitoring is in place. Save valuable time for busy auditors and reduce travel requirements in some cases, improving retention and job quality.

Improved Audit Quality

Move from sample-based testing to monitoring full populations of data and identifying all exceptions. Ensure consistency of testing processes and enable auditors to focus time and attention on most important business areas. Approva enables real time disclosure in the reporting cycle.

Improved Operational Effectiveness

Detect potential business risks or problems early and notify managers so appropriate action can be taken immediately to eliminate the risk or stop the problem. Improve cash flow by identifying best practices and non-compliance with corporate policy (such as payment terms) resulting in optimized business processes.

Reduced Fraud Risk

Prevent occupational fraud including collusive fraud by creating a perception of monitoring. The Association of Certifried Fraud Examiners (ACFE) estimates that fraud costs 5% of annual revenue, on average. Eliminating just 10% of this cash leak can result in significant savings.

Additional Product Resources

American Conference Institute’s FCPA Conference

Approva Appoints Industry Veteran as CEO

John Becker

John Becker

Senior Consulting Project Manager

Approva Receives “Strong Positive” Rating in Leading Analyst Firm’s Report

Gartner: MarketScope for SoD Controls Within ERP and Financial Applications

MarketScope for Segregation of Duty Controls Within ERP and Financial Applications

Addressing FCPA Risks with Automated Controls Monitoring

Try These Innovative Marketing Techniques

Approva Announces Release of Certification Manager

Approva Ranked 2nd Fastest Growing Company in Virginia

Certification Manager

Say Goodbye to Spreadsheets. Automating Access Certification for All of Your Applications.

Approva Rolls Out New Risk Oversight Options

The Controls Challenge

Approva CEO to Share Controls Intelligence Success Stories at Audit World 2008

Approva Expands Global Presence in Partnership with BDO Malaysia

Ernst & Young Signs Multi-Year Licensing Agreement with Approva Again

Ernst & Young Offers Risk Control Analytics

Ernst & Young Signs Multi-Year Licensing Agreement

Honeywell Podcast

Top Control Concerns: User Access, System Settings, and Security

AMR Research Alert Article - What Happens to SOX?

Approva CEO Invited to Speak at IIA International Conference

Red Herring Announces Approva as 2008 North America Top 100 Winner

Certifying User Access in Enterprise Business Environments

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Other Information

Experts offer tips on IT business controls

SSPA Honors Approva with Star Award for Best Practices in Customer Support

Approva CEO Selected to Present at MAVA’s Capital Connections 2008

Red Herring Announces Approva as North America Top 100 Winner

Approva CEO Named E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year® 2008 Award Finalist

Approva Announces Release of BizRights 4.1

SSPA Honors STAR Awards Best Practices Winners

General Ledger & Journal Entry Monitoring

Continuous Controls Monitoring for Financial Controls

Approva’s Approach

Approva's Controls Intelligence Suite provides continuous controls monitoring over the general ledger, journal entries, and financial transactions. Approva automates financial controls, strengthening their effectiveness and reducing the time spent managing and testing manual controls. It proactively flags unusual journal entries (such as debits to credit accounts or large manual postings), inappropriate changes to the chart of accounts, and high risk configurations that can directly affect financial statements. By notifying the right managers throughout the quarter, managers have time to act and there are no surprises at the end of the quarter.

Key Benefits

Reduced risk in shorter financial close cycles

Reduce the risk of financial misstatement or significant deficiency with Continuous Controls Monitoring. Managers can focus time and attention on true exceptions, not just proving that transactions are legitimate. Even more importantly, mistakes or anomalies are discovered early with proactive notifications throughout the quarter, not at the time of the financial close.

Stronger, more effective controls without additional resources

With comprehensive monitoring, not just sampling, Approva provides stronger controls that reduce risk and mistakes without adding time to the financial close. Controls Intelligence enables you to automatically monitor for key risks without an army of people manual investigating financial anomalies. Enable manager to spend time working on high value strategic projects, instead of tracking down detailed to explain unusual financial transactions.

No surprises

Controls Intelligence provides an audit trail that improves visibility into financial controls and provides evidence that is easily accessible to managers and auditors. And with comprehensive automated controls and proactive notifications, you can avoid surprises during the financial close cycle or at the time of an audit. With continuous controls monitoring, management can sign off on the state of financial controls and the financial statements with more confidence.

Additional Product Resources

“Approva gives me a higher comfort level that all of the data that’s in the financials is supposed to be there and that it’s correct, accurate and complete.” – Manager of Financial Systems & Reporting, Siemens

Cash Management and Treasury Controls

Automate controls to improve cash management

Approva’s Approach

Approva’s Controls Intelligence Suite automates controls over cash flows. With continuous controls monitoring over cash collections and disbursements, organizations can reduce risk and improve visibility into cash management, helping optimize liquidity. Automated controls identify risks and weaknesses in the payment or collection cycle and proactive alerts allow managers to take action without delay.

Key Benefits

Improve control and management visibility across cash and bank processes

With automated controls and continuous monitoring, managers have a comprehensive and timely view into cash inflows and outflows. With proactive alerts, managers are notified of any early risk indicators in time to take appropriate action. Controls Intelligence provides greater visibility and better control over cash management, without slowing down business processes

Reduce risk of mistakes and fraud across cash management processes

Automated controls and continuous monitoring strengthen the effectiveness of controls over cash management processes. This improved Controls Intelligence reduces your organization’s exposure to fraud and mistakes.

Improve efficiency of cash management processes

Continuous controls monitoring over cash collections and disbursements can identify inconsistencies in processes across teams and can help ensure corporate policies are consistently followed. Best practices can be identified quickly and implemented broadly resulting in improved efficiency of cash management processes.

Additional Product Resources

New ERP Deployment: Control Design and Implementation

Approva’s Approach

Approva’s Controls Intelligence Suite builds automated controls into your ERP design and implementation. So whether you are upgrading your environment or preparing to go live with a new implementation, Approva builds automated controls for access, configurations, and operations into your system. This way, you can meet your go-live deadlines without significant risk exposure and avoid costly and time consuming redesign of processes and controls later on. Approva can even help you speed your go-live by strengthening controls, improving risk visibility in your current environments, and easing the transition to a new system.

Key Benefits

A More Streamlined Implementation Process

Complete your ERP implementation or upgrade on time in one smooth process, without immediate rework on process and security design, and retraining users. By building automated controls in to the system design, avoid delays in rollout and provide strong risk management capabilities from day 1.

Less Costly, More Effective Controls

By designing automated controls into the system and processes, eliminate time consuming and costly manual controls. Save time not just for managers who own the controls, but for internal audit, risk management, and compliance teams who are testing controls and external audit teams as well. In addition, automated controls can be continuously monitored and are often more effective.

Reduced risk of mistakes, fraud, audit findings, and non-compliance

With automated controls built into the system from the start, you will have strong and timely visibility into business risks. With Approva, material mistakes are flagged immediately so the right manager can take action, fraud risk is significantly lower, and it is easier to ensure that divisions around the world are complying with corporate policy. Controls are continuously monitored so you have no surprises, even in a new system environment.

More Efficient Operational Processes

Continuous controls monitoring from Approva provides visibility into inconsistencies in business process execution. There is so much change associated with a new ERP deployment, often it’s difficult to know whether processes are being consistently followed in all business units. Approva enables organizations to identify inconsistencies, standardize processes more quickly, and implement best practices globally.

Additional Product Resources

“Ensuring controls is a top priority for our SAP rollout,” said Mark Weber, director of internal audit at Wabash National. “With Approva’s solution, our goal is to strengthen our overall controls environment and reduce the time spent on monitoring and testing our ERP controls. (from August 7, 2006 press release)

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Approva Named Red Herring North America Top 100 Finalist

Continuous Auditing of User Access & General Computing Controls at Honeywell

AMR Research Alert Article - Profiles in Compliance

Star Excellence Award for Emerging Business Support

Partners

Approva has developed an extensive network of partners to accelerate the development and delivery of our solutions. We work hand-in-hand with some of the most respected audit and consulting firms, technology vendors, industry associations and regional channel partners to define the requirements for our solutions and better serve our global customer base. In addition, we have an active training and certification program to expand the community of Approva certified implementation partners.

Channel Partners

Software Partners

Service Partners

Terms of Use

Approva Corporation Website

Welcome to the Approva Corporation Website ("Site"). We hope that you find the information on the Site useful and informative. By using the Site, you accept and agree to abide by all of these Terms of Use. If you do not accept any of these terms, please do not use the Site.

Privacy Policy

Last Updated: March 15, 2008

Approva Corporation respects your privacy, and is sensitive to concerns regarding the collection and use of personal data. Our goal is to provide you with information targeted to your industry, your role in your organization, and your specific preferences. In order to provide you with information that is relevant to your needs, and to fulfill specific requests on your part, we may occasionally request personal information from you. The information requested, and how it is used will vary across our website.

Approva Corporation and its subsidiaries (collectively, “Approva") have developed this Privacy Policy to explain why we collect particular information and how we will protect your personal privacy within our website (the “Site"). The following information summarizes Approva’s policy relating to the collection and use of information obtained from the Site. By using this Site, you consent to the collection and use of information about you in the ways described in this Privacy Policy. Approva reserves the right to change its Privacy Policy at any time by posting the new privacy statement at our website Homepage. By using the Site subsequent to such changes, you consent to them. The last date the Privacy Policy was revised is set forth above.
Collection and Use of Personal Information

Approva will only collect contact and other personally identifying information, such as your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address ("Personal Information"), when voluntarily submitted by you, such as when you contact us or complete an online form or request. If you do not want us to collect any Personal Information, do not submit it to us.

Your Personal Information may be stored and used by Approva to provide services to you, to create a personalized experience for you, and to get in touch with you when necessary with respect to transactions conducted through the Site, material changes in our Site’s policies, new products or services that Approva may offer, or otherwise. If you do not wish to receive such materials, you may opt-out. (See the Opt-Out/Corrections section below for more information.) Except as described in this Privacy Policy, we will not sell, rent or disclose your Personal Information to our business partners, suppliers, vendors or other third parties without notifying you of our intent to share the information and giving you an opportunity to prevent your information from being shared. Approva reserves the right to disclose your Personal Information to its successors-in-interest or in connection with a merger or acquisition transaction or change of control or when required by law or necessary to protect the rights, property, or personal safety of Approva, its customers and/or the public.
Collection and Use of Non-Personal Information

Demographic and profile data (e.g. job title, corporate function) may be collected at our Site. In addition, when you access the Site, our Web server may automatically collect certain information that is not personally identifiable, such as your IP address, pages viewed, length of time spent on the Site and other transactions performed on the Site. We store and use the foregoing information, in the aggregate only, to diagnose problems with our server, to improve and track the success of the Site and to provide content of interest to you. We may share the foregoing information with advertisers or other third parties, including our business partners, suppliers, and vendors, on an aggregated basis without revealing any personally identifiable information.
Use of Cookies

Our Site may use cookies to enhance your experience while using our Site. Cookies are small electronic files that a website may transfer to the user’s computer, and are used for record-keeping purposes. Use of cookies makes web-surfing easier for you by performing certain functions such as saving your passwords or your personal preferences regarding your use of the particular website. Many consider the use of cookies to be an industry standard.

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To the extent hyperlinks are utilized to access external or third party sites, you should be aware that these external or third party sites are not controlled by Approva and, therefore, are not subject to this Privacy Policy. Approva suggests that you check the privacy policies of these sites to determine how your personal information will be utilized by the proprietors of those third party sites.
Information Security

This Site has industry standard security measures in place to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under Approva’s control. All customer information collected by Approva through the Site will be protected by an industry standard encryption scheme. All information, once received, is stored behind our corporate firewall. However, although Approva has endeavored to create a secure and reliable Site, the confidentiality of any communication or material transmitted via the Internet cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, you should consider carefully if you want to submit sensitive information via the Internet.
Opt-Out/Corrections

If, at any time, you wish to stop receiving e-mail information from Approva, you may unsubscribe by replying to the e-mail with the words “unsubscribe” in the subject line. If you want to update or correct your Personal Information, you may phone our customer service representatives at the telephone number listed below with any requests or changes. In the event Approva receives such a request or change, Approva may require you to confirm or verify any change to your record. Also, please be aware that it may take a few days to process your request.
Access by Children

This Site is not intended for individuals under the age of thirteen (13) ("children"). Accordingly, Approva will not knowingly collect or use information from children. Children should not submit any personal information without the permission of their parents or guardians.
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If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, the practices of this Site, or your dealings with this Site, you can contact us at:

Approva Corporation
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Tel: 703-956-8300

Solutions

Real-time insight into your business

main graphic

Business Challenges that Approva Addresses

Approva’s Controls Intelligence Suite provides real-time insight and analysis about the state of controls across your business. Companies are using the product to address a wide array of business challenges.

User Access Controls & Security

Ensuring employees have proper access to sensitive financial systems and making the right tradeoffs between productivity and efficiency:

Master Data Integrity & Accuracy

Ensuring that the underlying data that drives your financial systems and business processes is accurate and up to date:

Controls Design & Optimization

Designing and optimizing controls across the organization that maximize both security and efficiency:

Financial & Operational Controls

Automating and monitoring controls that can impact the integrity and accuracy of your financial statements:

Fraud Identification & Prevention

Identifying, preventing and eliminating fraudulent activity across the organization:

Compliance & Continuous Auditing

Responding effectively to new and existing regulatory requirements while reducing audit-relates costs:

Process Configuration Insight

Baseline and monitor process configurations

  • Product Overview
  • Key Benefits

What is Process Configuration Insight?

Process Configuration Insight proactively monitors process settings across your critical business systems. This continuous monitoring provides visibility into the status of the process configurations and informs the proper stakeholders if unexpected risks are introduced.

Process Configuration Insight Software Capabilities

Baseline ERP Settings and Configurations

Take a "snapshot" of your process configurations when best-practices are in place. From that point on, Process Configuration Insight continuously monitors your systems to detect any important changes, such as changes to the three-way match flag or changes to acceptable tolerances or required fields.

Proactive Notifications

Immediately alert the relevant stakeholders if a process configuration setting changes unexpectedly or a control is violated. Users can also subscribe to regularly receive reports via e-mail.

Automated Reporting

Process Configuration Insight provides an audit trail that demonstrates that your process configurations have remained in place over time without unauthorized changes. Reporting can be automated to push the right reports to the right managers or even document repositories.

Best Practice Business Rules

Use out of the box, best-practice business rules specific to your ERP environment. Rules are organized into a library of easy-to-manage rulebooks that have owners and can be locked. In addition it is easy to edit rules or build new rules to match your specific business process and control framework.

Strengthen Business Process Controls

Replace manual controls or transaction sampling techniques with automated and continuous monitoring of process configurations. Save time and effort in managing the control, testing the control, and reporting on the results.

Reduced Audit Preparation Costs

Reduce the time and disruption of preparing for your audits. Reports and audit trails are stored for easy retrieval and can be pushed to any kind of document repository. Store records of any changes to process configurations and provide evidence that settings have remained in place over time.

Reduce Risk of Mistakes or Fraud

Use out of the box, best-practice business rules specific to your ERP environment. Rules are organized into a library of easy-to-manage rulebooks that have owners and can be locked. In addition it is easy to edit rules or build new rules to match your specific business process and control framework.

Improve Effectiveness of Process Controls

Prevent mistakes and fraud from occurring by immediately identifying changes to the system that violate corporate policy and could introduce risk. By catching such configuration changes early, systems can remain more secure and improper or unauthorized transactions are avoided.

Approva allowed IT security to close out several audit findings within two months and improve visibility into the system settings. If a change is made we can track it. This has allowed the security team to improve performance and security.

- Manager Application and Data Security, Honeywell

Typical Users:
  • IT Security Managers
  • IT Change Management
  • Control Owners
  • Enterprise Risk Management Teams
  • Internal Auditors
  • ERP “Go-Live” or Upgrade Teams

Approva Client Services

Professional Services, Customer Support & Training

Approva’s professional services and customer support organization ensures that you realize the benefits of your investment quickly and then sustain and grow that value over time. With a worldwide staff of services professionals and more than 300 Approva Certified Professionals (ACPs), we offer comprehensive implementation, program management and controls development and configuration services.


Application Implementation

Using the Approva FastTrack implementation approach our services staff gets your team up and running quickly – usually in a matter of days. We follow a standard methodology that includes installation, training and configuration. Our business-friendly solutions require minimal training so you can focus your time and effort where it belongs – on your business challenges. Learn more.


Project & Program Management

For customers with large-scale implementations and complex projects Approva offers program management services. Our project teams ensure that our solutions align with your overall project objectives. We identify project requirements, provide on-site project management and ensure that projects are delivered on-time and within budget. Learn more.


Controls Development & Configuration

The typical controls audit only addresses only a small fraction of most companies’ controls landscape. As the scope of your controls initiative expands our ACP partners will work with you to develop and configure additional operational, financial, and IT controls to support your business objectives and further streamline the audit process. Learn more.


Customer Support & Training

Approva’s Customer Support and training teams ensure that you continue to receive the highest level of service and maximize the value of your investment in Approva’s solutions. We offer global access to knowledgeable resources and a range of affordable and convenient training solutions. Learn more.

Approva Customers

The world’s largest and most respected brands rely on Approva

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Selected List of Approva Customers
Manufacturing & Transportation
Technology & Telecom
  • Advanced Medical Optic
  • Andrew Corporation
  • Datacard
  • Global Crossing
  • Hughes Network
  • Inter Public Group
  • Logitech
  • Lucent Technologies
  • McAfee
  • MCI
  • Pioneer Companies
  • Siemens PLM
  • Sony Ericsson
  • Spansion
  • Tellabs
  • T-Mobile UK
  • T-Mobile USA
  • Tyco Electronics
  • Vodafone
Energy & Chemicals
  • Air Products
  • Baker Hughes
  • Cameco
  • Citizens Gas
  • Denbury Resources
  • Dominion
  • Dynegy
  • Eastman Chemicals
  • Energen
  • Energy East
  • Halliburton
  • Huntsman
  • Lyondell
  • Nalco
  • Noble Drilling
  • Occidental Chemical
  • Owens Corning
  • OxyChem
  • Pioneer
  • PQ Corporation
  • Reiance Industries
  • Reliant Energy
  • Saudi Aramco
  • WE Energies
Media & Entertainment
Pharmaceuticals & Biotech
  • AMO
  • Bayer
  • Bristol Myers Squibb
  • Fresenius
  • Johnson and Johnson
  • MedImmune
  • Novartis
  • Qiagen
  • Vistakon
Public Sector

Top 40 Under 40: Approva Customer Jason Lish, Computerworld

Best Integrated Marketing Campaign B2B

2007 Hottest Management Finalist

Entrepreneur of The Year Finalist

Private Company CFO of The Year Nominee

Best Places To Work, 2007

Developing a Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) Roadmap at T-Mobile

UGS Achieves Best-in-Class Results, Reduces Costs with Approva BizRights

Datacard Group Strengthens Controls in Oracle E-Business Suite

Arch Chemicals Streamlines SOX Control and Compliance Processes in SAP

Privacy Protection & Monitoring

Strengthen Privacy Controls Through Continuous Monitoring

Approva’s Approach

Approva’s Privacy Protection and Monitoring solution goes deeper than data masking and encryption tools by keeping a watchful eye on sensitive information in your systems. It monitors user access to sensitive information and transactions, a key requirement of privacy frameworks such as the Generally Accepted Privacy Principles (GAPP). Approva secures sensitive fields such as social security numbers, compensation, bank account numbers, benefits, credit card information, and many more.

Key Benefits

Improves Privacy Protection While Reducing Operational Costs

Many companies struggle with a shrinking pool of resources and smaller budgets, while standards for data privacy become more stringent. Approva’s Privacy Protection and Monitoring solution flags issues that violate best practices for access to sensitive information and transactions. It keeps an audit trail to track changes and demonstrate compliance without the need to maintain hundreds of emails and spreadsheets. Hence, Approva’s solution enhances data privacy while also reducing costs through improved productivity.

Reduce the Cost of Maintaining Privacy Across Systems

The more complex a system architecture, the more difficult it can be to safeguard sensitive information that can be propagated throughout. Approva’s solution monitors sensitive fields across multiple instances to avoid the risk of a sensitive field being left exposed in an unprotected system. Safeguarding information with one comprehensive solution minimizes the cost and headache of maintaining numerous tools across environments.

Minimize Privacy Costs with One Comprehensive Solution

Approva’s solution automates many of the privacy requirements established by various organizations. For example, the Generally Accepted Privacy Principles (GAPP), put forth by a joint task force of the AICPA and CICA, is a framework that represents best of breed privacy requirements pooled together across myriad regulations. Approva’s solution automates requirements in 7 of the 10 categories of GAPP, many of which are related to ensuring appropriate user access to information, as well as, testing changes and providing and audit trail of them.

Reduce the Risk of a Data Breach by Safeguarding Sensitive Information

Ernst and Young estimates that the average insider breach costs companies roughly $2.7 million, with other industry estimates as high as $11.5 million. Knowing where sensitive fields (i.e. social security numbers, vendor or employee bank account numbers, credit card numbers, or compensation) are exposed across your systems or databases enables you to be proactive and reduce the risk of a costly breach in your organization.

Additional Product Resources

Approva proactively notifies security professionals and business users of violations of privacy best practices within the application as well as the database.

Products

Controls Intelligence Suite

The only comprehensive controls intelligence solution available that continuously monitors and optimizes both financial and IT-related controls regardless of the underlying business process and applications.

Approva’s Controls Intelligence Suite enables you to get an accurate and unified view of your enterprise-wide controls environment so you can reduce risk, accelerate the pace of operations and eliminate the burden of ongoing compliance obligations.

Our software suite identifies, remediates, monitors, reports and publishes timely risk information to control owners in IT, finance, internal audit and line management roles who are responsible for managing and acting on controls information.

BizRights Diagram
Learn More:

User Access Control   Configurable Controls   Operational Controls

Financial Controls:

Finance managers can monitor the controls that materially impact the balance sheet and income statement. Specific applications are tailored to address financial reporting accuracy, cash flow and treasury management, and working capital management.

IT Controls:

IT and business managers can optimize controls that govern who has access to core applications, how systems and business processes are configured, and how vendor, customer and employee data is validated and protected.

Fraud, Compliance & Audit Automation:

Internal and external auditors can design controls to identify and prevent fraud, perform automated control assessments to certify adherence to compliance obligations, and monitor conformance to corporate policies and procedures.

Application Submission

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