Breaking the Box Office Without Breaking the Close

Cinemark is known for bringing you quality movie experiences—though sadly, that isn’t happening right now because of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. But this doesn’t mean they can’t show you how to turn your close into a smashing success.

During a recent webinar, which you can now watch on-demand, Cinemark discussed how you can break the box office without breaking the close. Here are a few of the highlights.

Cinemark was faced with a challenge that is all too familiar to so many accounting and finance teams: they’re expected to meet increasing demand from other parts of the business, with the same amount of resources and legacy processes.

Over time, this leads to increased stress levels, more opportunity for errors, reduced morale, and getting stuck in the mindset of working reactively instead of proactively.

In fact, according to Forbes, three out of four CFOs believe stress levels will rise over the next few years—and that was pre-COVID! So, how can F&A teams meet increased demand with the same amount of resources?

Begin by communicating with and educating other business leaders about your needs and why new technology could benefit the whole organization. Along the way, prioritize what you want to do first.

If you start with the record-to-report process, you can quickly gain tremendous efficiencies and refocus your team’s time on more strategic areas, to prevent employee burnout. Keep up the communication with other teams and strategic advisors to ensure buy-in, and then you can get started on your finance transformation project.

As you begin your finance transformation journey, consider automation. Purpose-built technology helps your F&A organization increase efficiency, accuracy, and turnaround times while also lowering costs.

And those aren’t the only benefits. Automating your most manual, time-consuming processes can help with employee job satisfaction levels, allow your team to focus on value-added activities, and give you more ways to support the whole organization with data-driven insights.

Next, Cinemark offered a behind the scenes look at how they use BlackLine.

Some of the major challenges Cinemark’s F&A teams were previously facing include an account reconciliations process that was not standardized, multiple ERP systems, and limited visibility.

After a challenge from management, Cinemark achieved a quick implementation and completed its first set of reconciliations in BlackLine only two months after signing the contract. Since then, they’ve recognized the following benefits:

• Account reconciliations follow a formal policy

• Additional visibility into local account balances

• Balance and clarity of workloads

• Time and cost savings

And that’s just the beginning of Cinemark’s journey with BlackLine. Along the way, they want to get more out of Transaction Matching, expand their use of Account Reconciliations, and begin utilizing Consolidation Integrity Manager.

Watch this webinar on-demand to learn more about how Cinemark used technology to help achieve success, and how you can use automation to increase trust and visibility in your F&A organization.