7 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.
Control, validate, and streamline financial statement analyses.
Perform pre-consolidation, group-level analysis in real-time with efficient, end-to-end transparency and traceability. Reduce risk and save time by automating workflows to provide more timely insights.
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.
Optimize efficiency and ensure compliance in your invoice-to-cash process with automated invoice processing and a customer payment portal.
Apply customer payments to invoices automatically.
Transform your invoice-to-cash cycle and speed up your cash application process by instantly matching and accurately applying customer payments to customer invoices in your ERP.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Finance and IT leaders share a common goal of equipping their organizations with ways to work smarter to enable competitive advantage. This intersection between CFO and CIO priorities is driving more unity in terms of strategy and execution.
F&A teams have embraced their expanding roles, but unprecedented demand for their time coupled with traditional manual processes make it difficult for F&A to execute effectively. Transformation is necessary to address these challenges.
F&A leadership can have a significant impact by creating sustainable, scalable processes that can support the business before, during, and long after the IPO. This company-wide effort crosses multiple functional areas and is reinforced by critical project management and a strong technology infrastructure.
Timely, reliable data is critical for decision-making and reporting throughout the M&A lifecycle. Without accurate information, organizations risk making poor business decisions, paying too much, issuing inaccurate financial statements, and other errors.
The revenue cycle refers to the entirety of a company’s ordering process from the time an order is placed until an invoice is paid and settled. The inability to apply payments on time and accurately can not only lock up cash, but also negatively impact future sales and the overall customer experience.
While the responsibility to maintain compliance stretches across the organization, F&A has a critical role in ensuring compliance with financial rules and regulations. Together with expanding roles, new expectations from stakeholders, and evolving regulatory requirements, these demands can place unsustainable strain on finance and accounting functions.
In good company.
More than 4,300 companies of all sizes, across all industries, trust BlackLine to help them modernize their financial close, accounts receivable, and intercompany accounting processes.
Join an exclusive community of peers, partners, and BlackLine experts.
BlackLine users around the world gain access to a digital hub of insight, information, and engagement that enables the exchange of ideas and leading practices for peak F&A performance.
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.
Build a foundation for world-class accounting.
Whether planning your first implementation or expanding your BlackLine platform, leverage expert guidance to help you build and execute your vision, drive unified, automated, and continuous accounting processes, and enable Finance and Accounting to deliver strategic business value.
Accelerate adoption and drive productivity and performance.
One of the critical success drivers for any software technology is effective user training and adoption. Whether you are deploying for the first time or creating a sustainable education program for maximum value creation, explore how you can take the next steps to upskill your users.
Your success is our success.
From onboarding to financial operations excellence, our customer success management team helps you unlock measurable value. Through workshops, webinars, digital success options, tips and tricks, and more, you will develop leading-practice processes and strategies to propel your organization forward.
Go beyond with end-to-end transformation.
Powerful technology is only part of the story. Successful transformation requires expert guidance from a trusted partner. Explore offerings that unlock new transformation opportunities and make transformation a reality.
World-class support so you can focus on what matters most.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stay up to date on the latest corporate and high-level product developments at BlackLine. Here you will find a one-stop resource listing recent and historical news items, including announcement of new clients/partners, awards, new offices/facilities, personnel appointments/ changes, major software enhancements, executive speeches and upcoming events.
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.
BlackLine Partnerships
Our global network includes leading consulting and technology organizations that enable us to deliver exceptional solutions to our shared clients. Get acquainted with our partner ecosystem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Delivering an end-to-end solution for your financial close
BlackLine is an SAP platinum partner and a part of your SAP financial mission control center. Our solutions complement SAP software as part of an end-to-end offering for Finance and Accounting. BlackLine solutions address the traditional manual processes that are performed by accountants outside the ERP, often in spreadsheets.
August 03, 2022
7 minute read
Every business executive knows it—employees are the lifeblood of the organization. Finance and accounting leaders know something else. Hiring and retaining good people—the right people, considering today’s requirements for increasingly sophisticated skill sets—is more challenging than ever before.
That’s because as much as much as today’s F&A managers value data analytics, there’s still a pressing need to handle the day-to-day, period-to-period accounting tasks associated with compliance and governance. It’s often the accountants who face this dilemma and, by extension, the controllers who are managing and hiring them.
How well the controller navigates the challenge, through effective hires and a sound retention strategy, will go a long way toward determining the longer-term success of the F&A function and, ultimately, the business itself.
With Covid lockdowns now mostly a thing of the past, businesses are moving quickly—or trying, if they can find the employees—to capture new markets and expand market share.
Adding to this pressure, M&A activity continues to be strong after setting records in 2021. In a 2022 report, Morgan Stanley noted that 2021 was a record-breaking year for global mergers and acquisitions, and that “the key elements that made the 2021 market so strong are largely in place.”
Source: Refinitiv
Still, many businesses are hindered by the lack of qualified employees.
One reason: new workers are harder to find and hire than before the pandemic. According to global personnel consultants Robert Half, professionals who, after initial interviews, have “ghosted” would-be employers rose by nearly 40% since the pandemic started.
Another reason: employees are more likely to become dissatisfied and leave their jobs than in the recent past. A March 2022 CNBC story, “The Great Resignation Continues, as 44% of Workers Look for a New Job,” notes that a US survey showed that nearly 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs in January 2022, just shy of the record that was set in November 2021. In a 2022 study, workplace consultant Comparably points out that “while 6.3 million people got new jobs last year, there are still 4.6 million openings left unfulfilled and 58 unemployed people for every 100 of those available jobs.”
Included in all these findings are, of course, finance and accounting professionals. Controllers, CFOs, and other finance leaders are no less worried about the problems of hiring and retaining F&A pros than are their general business peers.
This is true across finance, regardless of industry. Studies have shown that most CFOs agree that finance organizations are facing a talent crisis and that they’re not confident they have the talent mix to meet business objectives.
Without the right mix, says BlackLine’s Vin Messina (a CPA who spent seven years in public accounting before turning to a career in financial software), the F&A function can become a disruptor—rather than a catalyst—for the finance department, and in some cases the business itself.
“There are significant costs that come from poor hiring and talent management. A big one is opportunity loss. If your people aren’t doing work that makes you more competitive, you’re losing on the back end of whatever work they’re doing. If you’re not leveraging F&A guidance for the next merger or acquisition, you might end up overpaying."
“Another cost is in low productivity and turnover. If you can’t get the right people for their jobs, productivity will suffer. And if you can’t get good people to stay in their jobs, you’ll be spending more time and resources than you should to find new ones.
“In either of these cases your bottom line will suffer. Worst case, you won’t get the kind of financial guidance you need for strategic initiatives.”
The challenge for F&A management is twofold. CFOs, controllers, and other F&A managers must find ways to maintain the organization’s daily and period-to-period accounting tasks while at the same time engaging and motivating their employees to bring their analytical skills to the organization.
“As accountants we’ve typically always been in charge of governance, control, compliance, reporting, and so on,” says Messina. “Then a movement began six or seven years ago to push accountants into strategic guidance, to help the organization with everything from pricing strategies to mergers and acquisitions.
“This is what accountants are doing now. But they’re also tasked with regular compliance work. As for CFOs and controllers, they need to find new hires who can do both, and that’s a struggle.”
This points to the chief challenge for controllers: being asked to do more—much more—by the organization. They’re asked to expand their business partnering, to make their accountants’ analytics skills available to finance, marketing, operations, and the executive suites, while at the same time maintaining best-in-class accounting operations.
And the ask grows more daunting by the day, says Messina.
“We’re living in a data-rich world. The problem is that every year there are more layers of data. Someone has to make sense of that world, and controllers and CFOs are getting intense pressure to respond with good hires.”
Adding to the challenge facing controllers is the fact that many C-suite executives and finance professionals are not confident that F&A can supply the skills or the related business acumen necessary to cope with the mounting influx of data. In a global survey conducted by research company Censuswide in late 2021:
35% said that not everyone in their finance team has the skills to help with more strategic work
38% of respondents said not everyone on their finance team has the broad business leadership knowledge or skills required today
34% said F&A is failing to keep up with other areas of the business in digital transformation
36% said it’s difficult to find new candidates with both technology and F&A skills.
The good news is that company leaders are willing to invest in talent acquisition, with 24% saying they’ll invest heavily.
Key for the controller is how best to use that investment. Based on interactions with thousands of successful companies around the world, BlackLine offers these insights to success in keeping and hiring the best people possible.
Find ways to retain and retrain current staff
“Hiring is costly,” says Messina, “But turnover is even more costly because you’ve already spent time and effort in bringing people onto staff and up to speed. Accountants want to be engaged, to feel like they’re contributing, and that’s what makes them want to stay working for an organization.”
In today’s data-driven world, that engagement means putting analytical skills to use and, more than ever, partnering with the organization’s business units. The controller should find ways to retrain and challenge accountants to develop their analytical skills. This means cutting back on the transactional work they do by automating rote accounting tasks, and then finding opportunities to extend training in strategic analytics.
Attract good hires with a commitment to data analytics
“Years ago, the controller would evaluate a potential hire by a few basic parameters. Do they have a CPA? Big Four experience? Questions like that. Now that’s just the price of admission,” Messina says.
Today’s controllers should also be looking for candidates who want to use technology to challenge the status quo. To attract these people, the controller should emphasize the company’s commitment to data analysis and its potential impact on business units as well as finance and accounting.
“This means playing to the accountant’s mental model,” says Messina. “Accountants like to think a certain way. Give us some transactions and some history and we’ll put together a puzzle that may help with the next corporate decision. If accountants can feel this level of involvement, or potential involvement, with the business, they’ll be likely to think seriously about joining the company.”
Work with top management to make employment as attractive as possible
Realize that today’s new hires are likely more demanding than ever before. For instance, research by Robert Half showed that schedule flexibility was nearly twice as important to candidates as were salary expectations.
Controllers should therefore work with upper management to make employment as agreeable as possible for the prospective new hire. One tactic: encourage a hybrid workplace, where employees can choose to spend some of their working hours at home, away from the office. Another: offer robust training opportunities for new employees by leveraging online opportunities to upgrade skill sets, and make sure they have the time to take advantage of these opportunities.
Process automation helps by freeing up accountants from a range of repetitive manual tasks associated with spreadsheet-based accounting—everything from ticking and tying transactions to hunting down documentation via emails and phone calls. They can spend more time working on and using analytics skills to help other units of the business assess strategic initiatives.
Cloud-based automation goes further, making it possible for accountants to work remotely while still getting full visibility into the data they need to do their jobs. This was a major benefit during the Covid lockdowns and continues to this day by offering flexibility in working hours and locations. It’s important, though, that cloud automation vendors possess full security credentials. BlackLine, for instance, has ISO/IEC 27018:2019 and ISO/IEC 27701:2019 certifications, the latest in the ISO/IEC series of international protocols.
To get started with process automation, companies can see immediate benefits by automating time-consuming tasks—the low-hanging fruit. Examples are core subledger and financial close activities such as applying cash to open invoices, preparing reconciliations, or submitting corrected journal entries. Once in place, cloud-based process automation also supports co-worker collaboration, replacing time-wasting video calls or emails with digital reviews and approval workflows.
Perhaps most important, automation represents an attractive inducement for potential new hires because it cuts down on the tedium of everyday accounting and opens the potential for advancement to more creative professional opportunities both in and beyond finance and accounting.
Get your copy of this exclusive playbook to win the war for retaining and attracting F&A talent. Learn strategies to reimagine F&A for the future of work, including how to:
Design a digital hybrid workplace that Accounting will love
Equip your organization to fight digital burnout
Automate away the soul-sapping work that makes accountants leave