In an effort to ensure best practices for financial governance and compliance across an organization, Trintech has released GRC Unity Suite 10.2, with three significant enhancements.

The newest version adds a collaboration module to the financial close application, making it easier for people to understand what's going on in their organization and recognize tasks that have to be done before filing; it also adds the ability to track footnotes. This results in a complete audit trail of all changes and edits made, stored in a secure repository inside the product.

"The audit trail is significant time and money savings when dealing with outside auditors," says Joe Nicholson, Trintech's VP of marketing.

Unity 10.2 also includes enhanced dependency capabilities. This feature helps organizations track the many tasks that have to be performed as part of a financial close or compliance activity and ensure those tasks are executed in the right order.

The third major enhancement in Unity 10.2 is its control hierarchy, which provides the ability to manage multiple compliance efforts across an organization. "Control hierarchy," Nicholson notes, "gives the overall compliance manager of the company visibility into all the things they are managing across all the different initiatives." Unity 10.2 has a series of "stoplights" that tell the manager what is ahead of schedule, what's behind schedule, issues raised, and provides the ability to drill down all the way to the compliance control.

"We believe your greatest risk in an organization is actually within the finance area - earnings, financial risk, financial control," Nicholson explains. "This product takes an interesting approach to defining and understanding things going on in an organization from a governance, risk, and compliance [GRC] perspective."

Beneath the GRC suite is a business process management engine, signifying Trintech's history as a business process management company long before getting into the compliance space. Because of its BPM foundation, Unity 10.2 is able to integrate all compliance activities into a dashboard approach.

"From a business process standpoint," Nicholson says, "the biggest challenge was not fraud. It's really more that there was a process breakdown in one or more process initiatives. We ensure that the right people in an organization do the right things in the proper sequence and proper timeframe."

Customers include 600 global companies in the U.S. and Europe, such as Gap Inc., McKesson, Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, eBay, CME Group, Questar, and Kinder Morgan.

Trintech competes with major ERP vendors Oracle and SAP, as well as point solution vendors. Nicholson notes, "We are very much focused on an integrated suite across the financial risk and compliance market," including account reconciliation, financial close and reporting, compliance, and enterprise risk management.

Pricing varies widely depending on the number of applications and the number of seats an organization has. A typical starting price is $100,000 for one of the major applications for 50 to 100 seats.

For more information, go to: www.trintech.com