LOS ANGELES, LONDON and SYDNEY – Jan. 25, 2016 – BlackLine today announced that its cloud platform for Finance Controls and Automation is the first to enable ‘Continuous Accounting’ across the enterprise. Continuous Accounting enables customers to move beyond outdated processes and point solutions to a model where real-time automation, controls and period-end tasks are embedded within day-to-day activities. With Continuous Accounting, companies can continually capture, validate and produce financial data, resulting in an accounting calendar that more closely mirrors the broader business. Finance & Accounting (F&A) teams employing a Continuous Accounting model through the BlackLine platform also can reduce business process costs while optimizing process effectiveness and efficiencies.
In many cases, antiquated period-end and traditional Record-to-Report accounting processes are holding F&A, and ultimately the business, back. With the growing complexities of today’s 24/7 global businesses, many organizations are seeing an influx of transactions being created and processed around the clock, which can increase the total number of unreconciled transactions and cause a strain on employee productivity during the period-end. Closing the books with such massive amounts of data is often chaotic, can lead to a higher error rate, and may lower the effectiveness of F&A teams. In addition, there is limited visibility into results until the books are closed. Continuous Accounting more evenly distributes the workload associated with the period-end close, while enabling constant reporting, verification and analysis of business results.
The ‘continuous’ aspect of Continuous Accounting refers to the capability for transactions to be fully processed and financial information to be reconciled, checked and verified on a real-time or near real-time basis. Accountants can perform tasks in smaller chunks on a more frequent basis, smoothing out workloads. Controllers and CFOs can evaluate the integrity of information at any given point in time, enabling continual monitoring for errors, fraud and inefficiencies.
“Continuous Accounting reflects a modern way of operating. Rather than executing the majority of period-end accounting efforts in only a few days with little time for review—and potentially exposing the business to fraud and restatement risk – work can be performed as required in smaller batches, producing more accurate information whenever it is needed,” Therese Tucker, BlackLine CEO, said. “Companies looking to truly modernize their Finance & Accounting organizations and achieve the highest possible levels of efficiency and productivity need to move to a Continuous Accounting model sooner than later.”
BlackLine will be hosting a webinar tomorrow, Tuesday, Jan. 26th, at 10 a.m. PT entitled “New Accounting Breakthrough for 2016 – Continuous Accounting: The End to the Traditional Record-to-Report Process.” For more information or to register, go here.