LOS ANGELES – Nov. 14, 2016 – BlackLine (Nasdaq: BL), a leading provider of financial controls and automation software that enables Continuous Accounting,today announced updates to its flagship Finance Controls & Automation Platform designed to further enable Finance & Accounting (F&A) departments to transform their operations into true Modern Finance organizations. The new features will be unveiled this week at BlackLine’s annual InTheBlack user conference in Los Angeles (ITB LA).
Highlights of BlackLine’s updated platform functionality include:
Enhanced Reporting Framework – Historically, software users have gotten used to having to build reports manually, often accessing information via multiple data pulls and then having to export the data to Excel to analyze it. With significantly increased processing speeds and enhanced functionality, BlackLine customers can now access extremely large amounts of data instantly, enabling customers to generate custom reports within seconds from within the BlackLine application screen where they are working.
Enhanced Navigation Menu Bar – With a sleek, modern look and feel, BlackLine’s navigation tool now combines an intuitively organized menu with enhanced system search capabilities and represents the first of many graphical interface enhancements planned to be phased in over the next year to improve the overall user experience.
Optimized Connector for SAP® ERP & Transaction Clearing – A typical customer running SAP ERP may have millions of open items, often requiring lengthy analysis as part of the reconciliation process and also manual effort to clear these items after analysis. Without BlackLine, the manual process of analyzing this information can often lead to transactions that are written off or inaccurately left open. BlackLine’s updated connector for SAP ERP is now able to automatically clear open items in SAP ERP, delivering an end-to-end solution to automate the analysis, reconciliation and clearing of open items.
“Through customer-focused events such as ITB LA, we are constantly soliciting end user feedback – looking for ways to continuously improve their experience with updates to things like reporting and navigation that will ultimately help all of our customers achieve unprecedented control, visibility and efficiency across their Finance and Accounting organizations,” said Therese Tucker, CEO, BlackLine. “For our customers running on SAP ERP, we are now providing an end-to-end open item clearing solution. We believe an account reconciliation solution for SAP ERP without this capability would be incomplete.”
“Using BlackLine alongside SAP ERP helps reduce risk by replacing manual, error-prone processes with a secure end-to-end process,” said Dr. Christoph Ernst, senior director, Finance Solutions, SAP. “The BlackLine Financial Close Suite for SAP® Solutions complements the functionality inherent in SAP ERP. Together, BlackLine and SAP are ushering in a new era for Finance and Accounting, enabling continuous accounting – where activities are always happening, continuously throughout a period, minimizing the month-end crush during the close. We believe this has transformational benefits and will become the norm.”