8 minute read
Close faster with complete and accurate results.
Empower Accounting to manage and control the end-to-end financial close process by automating accounting workflows, providing a centralized and secure workspace to perform period-end accounting activities, and streamlining financial reporting.
Standardize, control, and streamline reconciliations.
Increase accuracy and efficiency across your account reconciliation process and produce timely and accurate financial statements. Drive accuracy in the financial close by providing a streamlined method to substantiate your balance sheet.
Drive visibility, accountability, and control across every accounting checklist.
Standardize, accelerate, and centrally manage accounting processes – from month-end close tasks to PBC checklists – with hierarchical task lists, role-based workflows, and real-time dashboards.
Match, analyze, and reconcile millions of transactions in minutes.
Streamline and automate detail-heavy reconciliations, such as bank reconciliations, credit card matching, intercompany reconciliations, and invoice-to-PO matching all in one centralized workspace.
Centralize, manage, and automate journal entries.
Create, review, and approve journals, then electronically certify, post them to and store them with all supporting documentation. Automatically create, populate, and post journals to your ERP based on your rules.
Elevate control in the cloud.
Unify all compliance documentation, projects, and stakeholders in one globally accessible, cloud platform to maximize visibility. Link controls to related risks, narratives, and projects, and ensure version control.
Continuously monitor for risk with automated fluctuation analysis.
Calculate and identify account balance and activity fluctuations automatically to continuously monitor for risk, ensure the effective and timely execution of critical management review controls, and support agile decision-making.
Simplify, standardize, and automate your financial close in SAP.
Streamline and automate activities in SAP with task scheduling and execution, activity monitoring, and outcome verification.
Maximize working capital and release cash from your balance sheet.
Maximize working capital with the only unified platform for collecting cash, providing credit, and understanding cash flow. Transform your accounts receivable processes with intelligent AR automation that delivers value across your business.
Apply customer payments to invoices automatically.
Transform your order-to-cash cycle and speed up your cash application process by instantly matching and accurately applying customer payments to customer invoices in your ERP.
Create and operate risk polices with dynamic insights.
Understand customer data and performance behaviors to minimize the risk of bad debt and the impact of late payments. Monitor changes in real time to identify and analyze customer risk signals.
Release cash from customers and reduce DSO.
Improve the prioritization of customer calls, reduce days sales outstanding, and watch productivity rise with more dynamic, accurate, and smarter collection management processes.
Resolve customer disputes promptly to collect debt.
Accelerate dispute resolution with automated workflows and maintain customer relationships with operational reporting. Unlock full control and visibility of disputes and provide better insight into how they impact KPIs, such as DSO and aged debt provisions.
Maximize your time with data-driven prioritization.
Make the most of your team’s time by automating accounts receivables tasks and using data to drive priority, action, and results. Monitor and analyze user performance, ensuring key actions quickly.
Turn payment data into actionable, real-time intelligence.
Automatically process and analyze critical information such as sales and payment performance data, customer payment trends, and DSO to better manage risk and develop strategies to improve operational performance.
Unlock growth capacity with tax-effective intercompany operations.
Centralize, streamline, and automate end-to-end intercompany operations with global billing, payment, and automated reconciliation capabilities that provide speed and accuracy. Ignite staff efficiency and advance your business to more profitable growth.
Automate, optimize, and manage intercompany non-trade transactions.
Ensure consistent regulatory and tax compliance by automating non-trade transactions and invoices while enforcing trading relationships and policies, as well as required taxes and transfer pricing.
Centralize, streamline, and automate intercompany reconciliations and dispute management.
Seamlessly integrate with all intercompany systems and data sources. Automatically identify intercompany exceptions and underlying transactions causing out-of-balances with rules-based solutions to resolve discrepancies quickly.
Streamline and automate intercompany transaction netting and settlement to ensure cash precision.
Enable greater collaboration between Accounting and Treasury with real-time visibility into open transactions. Integrate with treasury systems to facilitate and streamline netting, settlement, and clearing to optimize working capital.
Get set up quickly for a streamlined and automated close.
The path from traditional to modern accounting is different for every organization. BlackLine’s Modern Accounting Playbook delivers a proven-practices approach to help you identify and prioritize your organization’s critical accounting gaps and map out an achievable path to success.
Save time and cost, decrease risk, and elevate the organization.
BlackLine’s foundation for modern accounting creates a streamlined and automated close. We’re dedicated to delivering the most value in the shortest amount of time, equipping you to not only control close chaos, but also foster F&A excellence.
Invest in your future by unifying and automating accounting work.
To sustain timely performance of daily activities, banking and financial services organizations are turning to modern accounting and finance practices. It’s no longer a matter of whether or not to digitally transform. It’s a matter of when and how.
Adapt to changing consumer preferences with agile accounting.
To mitigate financial statement risk and increase operational effectiveness, consumer goods organizations are turning to modern accounting and leading best practices. Simply sticking with ‘the way it’s always been done’ is a thing of the past.
Energize your accounting team by creating capacity with automation.
While you are innovating to produce safe, reliable, and sustainable products and services, our solutions help accounting teams save time, reduce risk, and create capacity to support your organization's strategic objectives.
Align healthcare accounting teams to revenue-driving activities.
Working capital, cash flows, collections opportunities, and other critical metrics depend on timely and accurate processes. Ensure services revenue has been accurately recorded and related payments are reflected properly on the balance sheet.
Unlock capacity and strengthen resilience by automating accounting.
To respond and lead amid supply chain challenges demands on accounting teams in manufacturing companies are higher than ever. Guide your business with agility by standardizing processes, automating routine work, and increasing visibility.
Tie out millions of transactions automatically.
Retailers are recalibrating their strategies and investing in innovative business models to drive transformation quickly, profitably, and at scale. Save time, reduce risk, and create capacity to support your organization's strategic objectives.
Transform the way you work.
You've transformed the way we experience the world. It's time to embrace modern accounting technology to save time, reduce risk, and create capacity to focus your time on what matters most.
BlackLine is part of your SAP financial mission control center. Our solutions complement SAP software as part of an end-to-end offering for Finance & Accounting. BlackLine solutions address the traditional manual processes that are performed by accountants outside the ERP, often in spreadsheets.
Global brands and the fastest growing companies run Oracle and choose BlackLine to accelerate digital transformation. BlackLine delivers comprehensive solutions that unify accounting and finance operations across your Oracle landscape.
Gain global visibility and insight into accounting processes while reducing risk, increasing productivity, and ensuring accuracy. Close the gaps left in critical finance and accounting processes with minimal IT support.
Adapt and innovate with a hyperconnected Accounting function and give everyone the insights and freedom to thrive by connecting your data, processes, and teams with intelligent automation solutions for accounting needs.
ESG is an opportunity for F&A teams to have a direct impact on how their organizations interact with the communities around them and how they deliver value to their stakeholders.
Rising labor costs and shifting expectations are contributing to unprecedented change in the labor market and altering the way companies and their executives think about talent management.
ERP transformations are business transformations. Finance and accounting expertise is not only needed to prevent ERP transformation failures, but F&A leaders are poised to help drive project plans and outcomes.
In good company.
More than 4,000 companies of all sizes, across all industries, trust BlackLine to help them modernize their financial close, accounts receivable, and intercompany accounting processes.
Powerful technology is only part of the story.
To truly transform your finance and accounting processes, you need the guidance of a trusted partner. Our proven approach has helped thousands of customers identify and address bottlenecks to free up capacity, strengthen controls, and deliver measurable results.
Your playbook for rapid success and proven value.
Using our unique experience and expertise, we will help you identify your most pressing accounting challenges and quickly deploy our software by providing a clear vision and predictable, confident delivery and implementation.
Guided, connected, and committed to your success.
BlackLine Services combine leading practices and expert guidance with best-in-class technology to help your F&A organization seamlessly implement sound processes and solutions, identify new opportunities for accounting optimization, and expand into areas you never imagined you would have the time to tackle.
Industry-leading customer support anytime, anywhere
BlackLine provides global product support across geographies, languages, and time zones, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We are here for you with industry-leading support whenever and wherever you need it.
Integrate your accounting operations with open APIs.
Our API-first development strategy gives you the keys to integrate your finance tech stack - from one ERP to one hundred - and create seamless data flows in and out of BlackLine.
Join an exclusive community of more than 350,000 accounting professionals.
BlackLine users around the world get access to key resources to develop expertise, interact with peers in F&A to exchange ideas and leading practices, and share their feedback to guide future product development.
Connect with peers across Finance & Accounting.
Whether new to BlackLine or a longtime customer, we curate events to guide you along every step of your modern accounting journey.
Hear from F&A thought leaders and customers like you.
Explore our schedule of upcoming webinars to find inspiration, including industry experts, strategic alliance partners, and boundary-pushing customers. And, earn CPE credits while you're at it.
Catch up on the latest finance transformation guidance.
Check out our most recent webinars dedicated to modern accounting. If you recently attended webinar you loved, find it here and share the link with your colleagues.
Dive into digital finance transformation.
Explore the future of accounting over a cup of coffee with our curated collection of white papers and ebooks written to help you consider how you will transform your people, process, and technology.
Stay on top of the latest accounting trends.
BlackLine Magazine provides daily updates on everything from companies that have transformed F&A to new regulations that are coming to disrupt your day, week, and month. Check back often for the latest commentary and guidance.
Brush up on key accounting terms.
Whether you're new to F&A or an experienced professional, sometimes you need a refresher on common finance and accounting terms and their definitions. BlackLine's glossary provides descriptions for industry words and phrases, answers to frequently asked questions, and links to additional resources.
We are here for your mission-critical accounting operations.
BlackLine provides global product support across geographies, languages, and time zones, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We are here for you with industry-leading support whenever and wherever you need it.
Since our founding in 2001, BlackLine has become a leading provider of cloud software that automates and controls critical accounting processes.
Companies come to BlackLine because their traditional manual accounting processes are not sustainable. We help them move to modern accounting by unifying their data and processes, automating repetitive work, and driving accountability through visibility.
BlackLine's leadership team is built on experience and expertise. Every executive is committed to ensuring transformational success for every customer.
At BlackLine, we live by these tenets and always put people first. We are committed to fostering an environment where differences are valued and practices are equitable.
BlackLine is committed to doing our part to create a more sustainable and equitable world, from setting high environmental standards in all BlackLine workplaces to supporting employee health and wellbeing, building strong relationships with suppliers from underrepresented communities, protecting customers’ data security and privacy and giving back to the community.
Explore original-content media coverage, commentary and analysis of BlackLine at top-tier business, trade, local and vertical media outlets, as well as contributed articles written by BlackLine experts and placed with leading media organizations.
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BlackLine is a high-growth, SaaS business that is transforming and modernizing the way finance and accounting departments operate. Our cloud software automates critical finance and accounting processes. We empower companies of all sizes across all industries to improve the integrity of their financial reporting, achieve efficiencies and enhance real-time visibility into their operations.
In addition to accolades for the quality, performance and benefits of our software, BlackLine has been the recipient of many industry awards recognizing the fast growth of the company, outstanding achievements of members of the management team and exceptional customer service.
Wondering what it's like to work at BlackLine? Don't take our word for it. We've been voted Best Place to Work by Inc. Magazine four years in a row. Built in LA ranks us in their top 20 best places to work in LA. Better still? We have in-office and remote-work openings all over the world.
Delivering Succesful Digital Transformations
Global and regional advisory and consulting firms bring deep finance domain expertise, process transformation leadership, and shared passion for customer value creation to our joint customers. Our consulting partners help guide large enterprise and midsize organizations undergoing digital transformation by maximizing and accelerating value from BlackLine’s solutions.
Guiding Customers to Long-Term Success
BlackLine’s Solution Providers are experienced business software resellers who know and understand the finance and accounting function and the associated challenges that organizations face. They ensure our customers’ success with BlackLine from the initial solution validation process through deployments and long-term customer care and long-term success.
Integrate Your Finance Tech Stack
BlackLine and our ecosystem of software and cloud partners work together to transform our joint customers’ finance and accounting processes. Together, we provide innovative solutions that help F&A teams achieve shorter close cycles and better controls, enabling them to drive better decision-making across the company.
Driving Automation with Your Outsourcing Provider
BlackLine partners with top global Business Process Outsourcers and equips them with solutions to better serve their clients and achieve market-leading automation, efficiencies, and risk control. By outsourcing, businesses can achieve stronger compliance, gain a deeper level of industry knowledge, and grow without unnecessary costs.
August 17, 2022
8 minute read
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria are a set of standards for a company’s behavior used by socially conscious investors and consumers to screen potential investments or business deals.
As a concept, sustainability is easy to understand. We all want to live safely and well, and we want to reward businesses that commit to basic human values. But turning those concepts into day-to-day reality is anything but simple, and in fact presents a growing range of challenges to the world’s businesses.
Those challenges, as framed by bodies such as the World Economic Forum and the SEC, involve creating measurable, meaningful data and reporting around the ESG efforts put forth by organizations and industries worldwide.
The problem: ESG measurement is a fast-moving target, with continuously evolving standards and frameworks. Businesses will be challenged to keep up as disclosure demands become more stringent in the future.
Still, there’s value in proactively taking hold of ESG reporting, and many business leaders feel that accounting and the CFO are ideally positioned to handle the task.
A recent Accenture survey pointed out that 68% of executives said the ultimate ownership around ESG should lie with finance.
And in How CFOs Can Manage Sustainability Risks and Find Long-term Value, Deloitte notes, “at the intersection of sustainability and financial performance, the CFO is in the best position to define and communicate how a company’s management of ESG risks contributes to value creation.”
According to BlackLine’s Vin Messina, CPA and finance technology expert, “at the end of the day, ESG is really a set of standards, or criteria, that investors can use to make decisions about investing, and other stakeholders can use to evaluate the health of a business. Taking the lead with ESG is really about collecting and reporting on metrics, and that’s what accounting is all about.”
Still, taking the lead may or may not be an enviable position, considering the many challenges that will come from the evolving demands of ESG reporting and the increasing scrutiny of companies’ stakeholders.
The risks of falling behind on ESG initiatives can be significant—and they can be obvious or hidden.
Obvious risks range from running afoul of the SEC or other standards bodies as reporting criteria evolve. This can potentially result in massive fines or higher insurance payments for businesses that fall behind. Another one could be lowered interest by investors that can result in reduced market value. That’s because investors are pressing more than ever for visibility, and action, into ESG concerns.
In Investors Push Companies For Specific ESG Actions, news and research organization Pension & Investments pointed out that “as the 2022 proxy season got underway in early spring, shareholders had filed 20% more ESG resolutions than the previous year.”
Other risks may not be so obvious. Employees, business partners, and even customers are more likely to base their employment, partnering, or buying decisions on a company’s reputational characteristics.
Deloitte gives these examples:
A beverage company loses access to water due to local water scarcity or loss of social license to operate in surrounding communities
A technology company fails to listen to its highly skilled labor force; employee turnover increases and the company loses its competitive advantage
A consumer products company faces brand and reputation damage and consumer backlash for instances of human rights violations in its supply chain
But just as business might be punished, directly or indirectly, for ESG infractions, taking effective action on ESG initiatives and reporting effectively to stakeholders can bring benefits to forward-looking organizations.
“One way that organizations known for high ESG preparedness are benefiting has to do with lowered total cost of capital. And that’s not just ‘good feelings,’ it’s real money.”
Banking giant HBSC agrees. In How An ESG Strategy Can Help Put Your Business Ahead Of the Pack, the company’s global head of sustainable finance Martin Richards says, “we’re seeing both access to capital and pricing of capital being driven by sustainability strategies.
“In the general credit market, we’re seeing equity being focused in this direction, and in the public bond market we’re seeing a definite discount on pricing for green bonds.”
Depending on their industry and business model, companies can benefit in other ways, too, by bringing in more efficient service vehicles, for example, or recycling waste products back into manufacturing processes.
“And of course, there’s recruiting and retaining employees,” says Messina. “Pursuing and publicizing a strong ESG commitment can be effective in finding and keeping employees who care about conscientious employers—those are good people to have in the building, for sure.”
Benefits aside, the organizational challenges facing newly-minted ESG working groups will be daunting.
At a high level, often there is a general lack of confidence within the organization concerning management’s ability to meet ESG requirements. In its 2022 ESG Reporting Survey covering North America, Europe, and APAC, ESG reporting experts Workiva said that 66% of senior decision makers feel that their organizations are unprepared to meet their ESG goals and regulatory reporting mandates. Further, 72% said they don’t feel confident in the data currently being reported to stakeholders.
A lower-level challenge involves the day-to-day business of satisfying specific disclosure and reporting demands. As an example, a multinational law firm that advises on ESG law pointed to an SEC risk alert for investment advisors and funds offering ESG products and services. The SEC found, among other things, inadequate controls for maintaining and monitoring ESG directives and portfolio management practices inconsistent with disclosures in some client-facing documents.
“Whoever takes the lead of an ESG working group will have to deal with these types of challenges, and many more,” says Messina. “For instance, the ESG contingent will have to be good at rallying business partners and executives to commit to specific roadmaps, while at the same time keeping a tight rein on controls and reporting.
“That’s why accounting is well-suited to take the lead. The CFO is used to working with C-level executives on strategic planning, and knows how to communicate with investors and other stakeholders. And accountants are no strangers to working with controls, aligning to standards, understanding risk, maintaining data accuracy and timely reporting, and partnering with colleagues throughout the business.”
Different companies will have wide varieties of specific issues to deal with, but in general, Messina advocates a four-point strategy for coping with the fast-growing responsibilities of ESG leadership.
The ESG leader should:
Build a close connection with uppermost leadership. An ESG strategy will demand a full commitment from the business, so it’s imperative to work closely with the CEO and other C-level executives, and to engage the board of directors as well. Deloitte recommends giving ESG a permanent spot on the board agenda and making sure that the board understand the relevant regulatory requirements and has access to the internal ESG data it needs to make strategic decisions.
Assemble a robust ESG working group. An effective working group will draw members from operations and business units as well as accounting and finance. The ESG leader’s job will be to evaluate and enhance, if necessary, the skills and resources needed to work on a myriad of tasks, from gathering and codifying data from across the company to tracking regulatory developments and monitoring competitors’ ESG efforts.
Another working-group function, risk evaluation, will work closely with accounting and finance to verify and update ESG-related data. Accuracy is key here. According to Accenture’s Measuring Sustainability, Creating Value report, 78% of global finance leaders were seeking to understand the financial risk of sustainability to their companies, but only 47% had defined key metrics and data sources for their reporting.
Partner with IT to maximize technology efficiencies. There’s no better time than now to extend the partnership between accounting and IT because new technology will be urgently needed to expedite the transition to successful ESG monitoring and reporting. For instance, accounting may be able to help IT evaluate performance of the emerging families of sustainability management software or services, and both accounting and IT should look into how they might make use of independent benchmarking services to assess the quality of the organization’s ESG data collection, monitoring, and management processes.
As the challenges become more complex, businesses should remember that the move to cope with ESG is not so different from other business enterprises, says Messina.
“It’s about a brand, about internal costs of capital, control mechanisms, and about business performance. It’s not just a random social consequence.
“At the end of the day, ESG success can bring about a competitive advantage for those organizations that do take it seriously. This is why companies should look first at the accounting/CFO function to take the lead in ESG management, because there’s nothing more serious than balancing the books and reporting to investors.”
Many accounting groups will face their own challenges as they gear up to take on their new roles in ESG management. For one, they’ll have to find extra capacity to add tasks, such as building new ESG reporting models, to their already hectic workloads.
Cloud-based F&A process automation can help open up capacity by reducing the time needed for mundane tasks such as ticking and tying numbers in a financial statement or tracking down paper documentation that may have been lost or destroyed. Also, these systems store financial data and documentation in the cloud, so they are accessible at any time of day to authorized accountants, controllers, or CFOs who may be working remotely or in different offices.
“This also makes it easier for auditors to access the data and documents they need remotely,” says Messina. “This saves time for everyone, and helps reduce travel, which can reduce a company’s environmental footprint.”
Importantly, many companies find it easier to hire and retain accountants who are motivated to take on strategic work and avoid the tedium of manual bookkeeping, Messina notes. “And these are just the types of people who will be in demand to help businesses succeed with their ESG programs.”
Watch this free on demand webinar Driving Sustainability From the Finance Seat to learn more about this emerging topic .