BlackLine’s 2022 Modern Accounting Awards: How Companies Go Beyond with BlackLine

We are excited to announce the winners of BlackLine’s 2022 Modern Accounting Awards. For the fourth year, the MAAs recognize customers that have achieved transformational outcomes by going beyond traditional manual accounting processes to embrace modern accounting.

The 2022 winners—spanning many industries and regions—demonstrate excellence in using BlackLine’s best-in-class solutions for financial close, intercompany accounting, and accounts receivable automation.

And the winners are …

This award is for the company that has achieved operational excellence by unifying data and processes with the deployment of BlackLine's unified platform for accounts receivable automation.

This year’s winner is McKesson, a pharmaceutical distributor and provider of health information technology, medical supplies, and care management tools.

McKesson’s previous solution had limited automating capabilities and required continuous updates to align functionality. In addition, the team had a low matching rate percentage (52%) and the level of unallocated cash was high, causing unhappiness and frustration among staff. The team needed a solution that could scale to meet the needs of the Fortune 16 company.

After implementing BlackLine, McKesson increased their automation rate to over 90% at a transactional level and realized annualized savings of over 7,500 hours while continuing to apply monthly cash receipts of over $435m.

This award is for the company that embraces Continuous Accounting by distributing close tasks across the period to reduce month-end workloads, speed up the close process, and support the business in real time.

This year’s winner is Chobani, a food maker with a mission of making high-quality and nutritious food accessible to more people, while elevating its communities and making the world a healthier place.

Beginning in 2019, Chobani kicked off an initiative to modernize its technology landscape by implementing best-in-class software, including SAP Financial Close Solutions by BlackLine, to optimize processes to better support the business and increase efficiency.

Using BlackLine’s Task Management, Account Reconciliations, and Variance Analysis solutions, the company has significantly enhanced visibility, reduced time to complete reconciliations by more than 80%, and had “monumental transformation” in its overall closing process, allowing for quicker, more accurate financial results and faster and more accurate business decisions.

This award is for the company that has transformed finance and accounting operations with a bold vision across people, process, and technology.

This year’s winner is Starbucks, a roaster, marketer, and retailer of specialty coffee worldwide. Starbucks believes they can and should have a positive impact on the communities, partners, employees, and customers they serve.

In 2018, Starbucks got serious about streamlining their processes with the power of the BlackLine Transaction Matching and Journal Entry solutions. When they first launched Transaction Matching, their match rate was around 70%. By refining pass rules and using reason codes and automated journal entries effectively and efficiently, that number now stands at 99%.

In addition, the company has focused on its partnership with BlackLine and attended the Optimization Academy. Their global admin role continues to evolve and includes educating users, building a BlackLine Ambassador program, and learning new ways to incorporate features. 

These efforts have enabled the team at Starbucks to optimize their use of BlackLine, ultimately saving their F&A professionals over 400 hours each month. And this is just the beginning! The team continues to challenge the status quo, test new features, and blaze a trail for continued BlackLine growth and optimization.

This award is for the company that has overcome the challenges inherent in a complex finance technology landscape by unifying data, processes, and visibility to deliver accurate results faster.

This year’s winner is Takeda, a patient-focused, R&D-driven global biopharmaceutical company committed to bringing better health and a brighter future to people worldwide.

Takeda has been a BlackLine customer for 12 years. In 2019, when Takeda merged with Shire, there was a renewed focus on change management and process transformation. Takeda selected BlackLine and SAP as two of the most critical software providers to lead the company into the future and enable successful transformation.

Takeda has rolled out BlackLine globally with a goal of moving beyond just providing accurate financials. Leadership empowers finance and accounting team members to be business advisors and to provide valuable insights as they shift their focus to higher-value corporate strategy.

This award is for the company that embraces modern accounting, moving from traditional chaotic processes to building a proactive, predictable, and agile F&A function.

This year’s award goes to Finning, the world’s largest Caterpillar dealer delivering unrivalled service for over 85 years. Finning delivers solutions that enable customers to achieve the lowest equipment owning and operating costs while maximizing uptime.

Finning fully embraced modern accounting by implementing fully automated BlackLine solutions and integrating their ERPs to BlackLine. This helped them create data sources to match transactions, post journals, and reconcile accounts, and allowed them to provide a superior user experience for their teams and stakeholders.

Finning has achieved impressive results. By automating with BlackLine, they have saved thousands of hours a year that were previously spent performing repetitive tasks, enabling their accountants to produce better quality financials and perform more value-added activities. Finning also reduced their close time by 50% (from 7 days to 3.5, with a plan to reduce to 3 in 2023).

This award is for the company that has automated routine accounting work to save time and refocus finance professionals on strategic business initiatives, revolutionizing finance and accounting use cases with process design and automation.

This year’s award goes to Light & Wonder, the global leader in cross-platform games and entertainment. The company replaced a complex manual process with an automated one that takes just 30 minutes per day, while also consolidating data from multiple systems into BlackLine to increase efficiencies.

"We’re honored to recognize all of the winners, as well as many of the other nominated companies, for making tremendous strides optimizing and automating critical processes in their finance and accounting organizations so they can deliver strategic value to the business," says BlackLine CEO Marc Huffman.

Read more success stories from BlackLine customers of all types, sizes, and industries.

Entries were evaluated and winners selected by a team of BlackLine digital finance transformation experts. Each year, award winners are celebrated on the main stage at BeyondTheBlack, where they share their transformation stories in featured sessions.