5 Ways Verity AI Helps Solve Record-to-Report Processes’ Biggest Challenges

Today’s CFOs operate at the intersection of unprecedented risk and opportunity. The mandate has expanded far beyond financial stewardship.

The scarcity of accounting talent is not a cyclical trend—it’s a structural reality. With an estimated 300,000 accountants leaving the profession in recent years, the talent pipeline is under severe strain. Successfully driving enterprise-wide finance strategy while facing relentless pressure for real-time forecasting now requires leveraging advanced tools like Verity AI.

Simultaneously, audit complexity has intensified. According to Audit Analytics, the average audit fee for public companies reached an all-time high of nearly $2.3 million, an increase of 10% from the prior year, reflecting heightened regulatory scrutiny and the intricate nature of modern business operations.

In this environment, legacy Record-to-Report (R2R) processes, dependent on manual effort and fragmented systems, are no longer sustainable. They are a bottleneck to agility and a drain on the very talent you may be struggling to retain. The solution lies in a strategic pivot to technology, specifically, the adoption of AI in Record-to-Report.

According to Gartner, 58% of finance functions are now using AI, closing the adoption gap with other corporate functions and signaling a definitive shift in strategy.

BlackLine is at the forefront of this transformation. Our AI-powered Verity™ capabilities are not an abstract concept; it is a practical, powerful engine for next-generation automation, mitigating risk, and turning the finance function into a strategic driver of value. This is how we deliver future-ready financial operations today.

Finance teams are often consumed by high-volume, low-value repetitive tasks that impede strategic focus. AI-driven automation like Verity directly confronts this challenge by absorbing the manual workload, freeing professional staff to concentrate on analysis and exception management. This shift is essential for talent retention and operational efficiency.

Imagine AI automatically preparing account reconciliations, retrieving necessary documents, and even drafting explanations for discrepancies, presenting a complete reconciliation ready for final human review.

Verity Prepare will automate the entire end-to-end reconciliation process, significantly reducing manual effort and accelerating the monthly close. Furthermore, our next-generation process automation, including Verity Match, will dramatically increase match rates in high-volume transaction environments within Transaction Matching, continuously refining its performance by learning from user interactions.

Automated content generation, powered by Verity Summarize and Verity Narrate, streamlines the creation of financial narratives and summarizes complex documents in seconds, freeing your team from time-consuming writing tasks.

This shift allows F&A professionals to focus on analysis, problem-solving, and strategic initiatives that truly add value to the business.

In an era of escalating regulatory scrutiny and complex financial transactions, the ability to proactively identify and mitigate financial risk is paramount. Traditional R2R processes often reveal issues reactively, leading to costly delays and potential misstatements. BlackLine Verity AI fundamentally shifts this paradigm, providing proactive analysis and intelligent risk detection.

Verity Flag, for instance, proactively analyzes transactional data to predict where issues are likely to arise before they manifest. It highlights high-risk transactions, explains the contributing risk factors, and provides actionable guidance for corrections, preventing problems from escalating into significant financial exposures.

Journals Risk Analyser (JRA), enhanced by Verity Flag, offers unparalleled visibility into your entire journal population, monitoring key metrics and irregularities with AI-powered anomaly detection. This ensures that potential risks related to manual journal entries are identified and addressed swiftly, staying ahead of audit concerns and decreasing the likelihood of misstatements. A proactive stance ensures continuous compliance and bolsters the integrity of your financial reporting.

Lastly, Verity Summarize is infused into our Intercompany solutions, providing further efficiencies in a solution designed to reduce regulatory and accounting risk and audit exposure and increase visibility into intercompany positions.

The financial close process is a direct reflection of a finance organization's efficiency and accuracy. In a world demanding real-time data, a lengthy, error-prone close is a competitive disadvantage. AI for financial close compresses timelines by automating core activities and ensuring data integrity from the source.

Verity Match ensures a near-perfect match rate, even in high-volume, complex scenarios, by learning from your data and suggesting more effective pass rules. This not only boosts efficiency but also enhances the accuracy of your transaction matching. By embedding AI-driven automation and intelligence directly into the core R2R activities, BlackLine reduces bottlenecks, minimizes manual interventions, and ensures that the financial close is completed faster, with greater reliability, and with verified data flowing downstream.

The ultimate mandate for the modern CFO is to guide business strategy. This requires transforming raw financial data into forward-looking, actionable intelligence. AI provides the analytical power to make this a reality, moving the finance function from a backward-looking scorekeeper to a forward-looking strategic partner.

Verity Insights enables users to go beyond simple data retrieval, allowing them to explore the story behind their numbers through natural language queries. Finance professionals can ask complex analytical questions, investigate trends, and perform on-demand analysis without needing specialized technical skills – allowing them to access insights faster than ever before. 

Verity Flux automatically consolidated account variances, eliminating countless hours of manual investigation and delivering the "why" behind the numbers in seconds.

Furthermore, Verity Assist provides immediate answers to complex workflow questions, empowering users to get instant status updates and guidance. These capabilities empower your team to drive smarter, forward-looking business decisions with deep, actionable intelligence, turning raw data into a powerful strategic asset.

The adoption of AI in finance is non-negotiable, but it must be built on a foundation of trust and control. For a CFO, a "black box" AI is a non-starter. BlackLine has engineered Verity AI with this principle at its core.

Our commitment to trustworthy AI is evidenced by our ISO 42001 certification for our Artificial Intelligence Management System. This rigorous standard validates BlackLine’s robust governance framework and the "Control Layer for AI" built into the Studio360 platform, ensuring our AI is developed and managed with the highest standards of ethics, transparency, and accountability. Every AI-driven action within BlackLine is auditable, providing the verifiable foundation enterprises require to run AI models safely.

Our dual-governance model ensures that while AI agents like Vera orchestrate complex workflows and review work, human users retain final authority and oversight. This integrated control environment means F&A teams can confidently leverage AI's transformative power, knowing that every action adheres to established policies and can be fully validated for compliance. BlackLine delivers AI that is not a "black box," but a transparent, controllable, and trusted partner in your financial operations.

The challenges facing the Office of the CFO are significant, but so are the opportunities. Leading finance organizations are no longer debating the merits of AI; they are actively deploying it to solve their most pressing strategic problems. With BlackLine Verity, AI in Record-to-Report is not a future promise—it is a present reality that delivers quantifiable returns in efficiency, control, and strategic insight.

The time to act is now. Explore how Verity AI can supercharge your record-to-report processes.