KPMG and BlackLine to enable Continuous Accounting

TORONTO, May 7, 2018 – KPMG in Canada and BlackLine, Inc. (Nasdaq: BL) today announced an alliance to provide technology and advisory services to help clients adopt a Continuous Accounting model, a modern approach that empowers finance and accounting (F&A) teams to deliver real-time financial intelligence to executives.

The alliance will combine KPMG’s finance process enablement and automation vision with BlackLine’s cloud platform for automation and analytics to provide clients with financial solutions that can be implemented into their business processes to help improve staff efficiencies, shift focus from transactional to analytical, and align finance strategies with those of the business.

“In today’s rapidly evolving business world, Continuous Accounting is essential,” says Stephanie Terrill, Partner and National Leader, Financial Management, KPMG in Canada. “Finance and accounting teams need to leverage technology to be able to quickly produce the information and analysis needed to address business challenges and opportunities as well as regulatory and reporting obligations.”

“As digital transformation becomes a heightened priority for most firms, KPMG and BlackLine can support the automation that will ultimately move finance professionals out of transaction processing and into more valuable operational and strategic decision support.”

As a leader in providing finance governance, compliance, controls and services, KPMG helps clients improve end-to-end financial reporting processes by enhancing real-time visibility, simplifying workflow, and reducing the time required to execute external and managerial reporting. KPMG has deep experience with enabling technologies geared toward financial close and reporting processes that can help companies standardize on leading practices.

BlackLine’s platform, which integrates with more than 30 enterprise resource planning systems, as well as many other financial systems and applications, replaces manual spreadsheet-based processes, streamlining accounting workflows and enabling accuracy and compliance auditability. The suite of applications supports account reconciliation, journal entry, task management, consolidation integrity management, intercompany management, transaction matching, and variance analysis.

The KPMG/BlackLine alliance in Canada follows the signing of a strategic alliance agreement between the two companies in the Unites States late last year.

“We’ve completed many successful projects with KPMG over the years where their in-depth knowledge and hands-on advisory services have helped us meet the requirements of global customers,” said Therese Tucker, CEO of BlackLine, a leading provider of financial automation software solutions. “KPMG has been a terrific partner in that they have been very vocal about the potential they see for BlackLine, as well as the direction they think we should take to get there. They see the broader vision of what BlackLine can do to transform Finance & Accounting organizations.”

About KPMG

KPMG LLP, an Audit, Tax and Advisory firm (kpmg.ca) and a Canadian limited liability partnership established under the laws of Ontario, is the Canadian member firm of KPMG International Cooperative (“KPMG International”). KPMG member firms around the world have 200,000 professionals, in 154 countries.

The independent member firms of the KPMG network are affiliated with KPMG International, a Swiss entity. Each KPMG firm is a legally distinct and separate entity, and describes itself as such.