In The Black
The Official BlackLine Blog About Accounting, Finance & Software
Welcome to In The Black where you’ll find articles that we hope hit on the key issues and topics of interest to accountants and other finance, compliance and audit executives in today’s ever-changing and difficult economic climate. We encourage you to post comments in response to what you read and engage with our team of esteemed authors – many of whom are CPAs or have extensive experience as accountants, senior level finance executives or auditors from well known companies.
 written by: Susan Hols | published in: Finance
February 22, 2012
In my experience, maintaining process documentation was usually given a lower priority and would fall by the wayside as higher priority activities were performed. This had unfortunate consequences down the road because we would often end up scrambling to bring documentation up to date just prior to an audit or review–not a very effective or [...]
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 written by: Caitlin Steel | published in: Accounting
February 11, 2012
Many accounting managers struggle with the annual goal setting process; it can be hard to quantify the work of the folks who do the counting! It’s ironic, but pretty common outside of sales teams. It’s not easy to come up with S-M-A-R-T (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time Bound) goals for employees who work in [...]
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 written by: Susan Hols | published in: Accounting
February 9, 2012
A common theme these days is how to get by with less money at your disposal. Whether it’s accounting, auditing or IT related, it seems that resources are the first thing to be scaled back during tough economic times. The reality is that if you have to do more with less, some tasks are likely [...]
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 written by: Caitlin Steel | published in: Accounting
February 6, 2012
Let’s face it… changing process is part of business today. When I think back over my career at the number of times systems had to be revamped to keep up with technology, it is stunning! And I have only been doing this 20 years. Can you imagine what the next 20 will bring? When focused [...]
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 written by: Susan Hols | published in: Accounting
January 31, 2012
A little planning can go a long way toward managing risk and improving an organization’s overall control environment. Taking the time to develop a strategic plan early in the year can result in time and resource savings throughout the year. When developing a plan, management should consider the current and future state of their financial [...]
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 written by: Chuck Best | published in: Finance
January 6, 2012
I was taking the garbage out the other night when I ran into my neighbor Bruce who is the CFO for a large service company – a big company CFO. I am a small company CFO. It was enlightening to speak with him about our differing positions. Of course we share many responsibilities, but the [...]
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 written by: Jeff Adler | published in: Accounting
January 5, 2012
I was reading an article recently distributed by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) regarding the FBWT (Fund Balance with Treasury) accounts for the Navy and Marine Corps. Here are some quotes from the article. See if this sounds like your organization… “The Navy and Marine Corps rely on the data from Defense Cash Accountability System [...]
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 written by: BlackLine Family | published in: BlackLine News
December 30, 2011
As December comes to a close, we want to send each of you our best wishes for the New Year. It’s time to take an audit of our 2011 personal balance sheets and consider what we can do to make 2012 more successful. The crises occurring all over the globe can cast a dim light, [...]
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 written by: Jeff Adler | published in: BlackLine Best Practices
December 28, 2011
At our User Group meeting in Las Vegas this past October, I had a discussion with David Hayes from The Bank of New York Mellon about the frequency of doing account reconciliations. As Director of Internal Controls, he is most concerned with one key priority: are the balances correct? Not far behind that is the [...]
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 written by: Therese Tucker | published in: BlackLine Best Practices
December 21, 2011
Jon Corzine, head of MF Global, said he was “stunned” to learn that they could not locate hundreds of millions of dollars. “I simply do not know where the money is or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date,” he said in testimony before the House Agriculture Committee. Investors and shareholders everywhere assume that this [...]
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