BlackLine Blog

September 18, 2019

One Thing You Can't Miss at InTheBlack

Modern Accounting
2 Minute Read
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Steve Soter

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The energy from all the conference attendees at InTheBlack this week has been invigorating. In my previous life, I served in senior finance and accounting roles before joining the cloud-connected reporting company Workiva.

I remember what it was like adopting transformative reporting technology—and finally being able to drive home before dark. Perhaps you’ve had similar moments since adopting BlackLine.

But what if I said there’s a way to get even more efficiency out of BlackLine, so you could not only drive home before dark but also have time for lunch on the same day?

A Connected Financial Close

If you made it to the session Achieving A Connected Close, you saw how using BlackLine and Workiva together can enable teams to achieve a connected financial close. Before leaving InTheBlack, stop by the Workiva booth for a more personalized look at what your team can do by working with both platforms. We’d love to meet you!

BlackLine and Workiva offer collaborative, complementary solutions to help finance and accounting leaders meet the pressures of today’s fast-moving organizations. According to PwC, that’s crucial when two-thirds of CFOs want to reduce production times for financial information.

Users of BlackLine & Workiva have delivered measurable results:

  • A household name saved $600,000 per year by using BlackLine to free accountants from routine tasks, so they can focus on discrepancies and analysis

  • A Workiva user saved a week on their 10-K filing

Connecting BlackLine & Workiva

We are excited to see what more of our joint users can achieve by connecting data from one platform to the other.

By using the cloud platforms together, finance and accounting teams can modernize the financial close from start to finish—including workflow, journal entries, reconciliations, analysis, and reporting.

Imagine verifying reported balances with BlackLine, and then leveraging the controlled reporting capabilities of Workiva to embed evidence, documentation, and context to deliver rich spreadsheets, presentations, and final reports.

Workiva enables you to link data from the source to multiple documents where the information is used so that when late changes occur, you can update data across all linked instances automatically.

Workiva provides an automatic audit trail with a complete revision history, so you can see what changed, as well as who made the change and when, for better transparency.

You can use BlackLine to validate data in Workiva. When combined with the ability to embed context in spreadsheets, presentations, and reports, you can deliver insights to executives with confidence.

In addition, you can manage workflow in Workiva for better visibility into potential bottlenecks. The blindfolds can come off.

If you are already using both BlackLine and Workiva, stop by our booth and let us know how it’s going. Enjoy the rest of the conference!

About the Author

SS

Steve Soter