Via Christi Health System is the largest provider of healthcare services in Kansas. Via Christi has been a Happy BlackLine client since 2008.

“I think your product is awesome and cannot imagine doing my job without it. When I first came to Via Christi in January 2008 I was immediately inundated with piles of paper reconciliations that I was responsible for reviewing. As you can imagine it was extremely overwhelming and I set out to find a more streamlined process. I was also supposed to sign a quarterly affidavit, if you will, that stated that all of our accounts were reconciled, reviewed and accurate. With the existing system there was really no way to truly know if that were the case. That’s when I found BlackLine, and I’m so glad I did.

As I mentioned a while back we are rolling BlackLine out to several other segments of our business. Beginning in September we are adding new users and double the number of accounts we are reconciling and expect to continue to add more as we move through 2010.

Even though our organization is relatively small, we have been able to glean huge benefits using the system. We have identified over 200 accounts that were active in our general ledger but had no activity and should have been inactivated. They were just out there waiting for someone to post something to them in error. As a result of using BlackLine we have been able to identify and inactivate them. We have also reduced our number of reconciliations almost by half by using the group feature. In addition, we determined that a number of accounts can be auto-certified saving our staff from having to go in and certify the account manually.

Another benefit we’ve realized is that we found several of our accountants were not doing true reconciliations. They were simply rolling the balance forward, regurgitating the g/l activity and calling it reconciled. I’ve been able to leverage off of BlackLine’s training and ease of documenting support by attaching it electronically to the reconciliation to ensure that accounts are truly reconciled with appropriate documentation supporting the balances. Now when I sign the quarterly affidavit I’m confident that we are in compliance.

We also saw benefits as we recently went through an internal audit. All the accounts were available to the auditor to review and see including the documentation, backup and approvals with date and time of reviews. This was the catalyst for rolling out to several other business segments this month. We plan to use the system’s Task module to manage our year end external audit coming up in a few weeks.

There are many other features that we haven’t even touched on yet that I’m looking forward to utilizing in the future like the intercompany group feature and matching.

I completely understand why your business is growing so rapidly, I just don’t understand why it isn’t growing even faster! There is simply no comparison to the old way of doing things and the simplicity of using BlackLine.

As you can see, even companies with just a few thousand accounts can benefit from using BlackLine compared to the old, cumbersome spreadsheet method. Please let your team know that we are grateful for your product and look forward to using it for many years to come.”

Debbie Jansen
Manager
Financial Accounting
Via Christi Wichita Health Network