What exactly is Financial Reporting Analytics?

Financial Reporting Analytics is a new solution that delivers real-time snapshots of balance sheet and income statement reports and allows companies to compare, validate, and attest to amounts and explanations and perform key consolidation activities. It helps streamline and accelerate a process that is so often done manually, involving a lot of people, emails, and spreadsheets.

You mentioned that Financial Reporting Analytics allows companies to do comparisons. Can you elaborate?

Yes. With Financial Reporting Analytics, companies can select different periods to compare ending balances or activity between periods. They can also compare actual amounts to budgets and forecasts. This helps identify unusual variances or items needing follow-up prior to consolidation.

Can Financial Reporting Analytics be my consolidation solution?

For many organizations, Financial Reporting Analytics delivers critical financial consolidation capabilities—mapping of data from ERPs, aggregation of group-level data, intercompany eliminations, currency translation, and top-side journal entries. However, if an organization already has a consolidation solution, Financial Reporting Analytics can enhance them with the ability to analyze consolidated financial statement line items and variances. It also provides for drill down into underlying balances, attestation, and explanations for variances at any level.

Can Financial Reporting Analytics replace your financial reporting system?

No. Financial Reporting Analytics does not address the entire financial reporting process. However, it can integrate with financial reporting systems to streamline the overall process. Key outputs from FRA, like balance sheet or P&L fluctuation explanations, can be pushed to financial reporting solutions to support footnotes or other disclosures.

You’ve mentioned that Financial Reporting Analytics can address fluctuation analysis. Does it replace BlackLine Variance Analysis?

No. Financial Reporting Analytics does not replace BlackLine Variance Analysis. FRA integrates with Variance to provide status and explanations in a financial statement structure view. It unlocks new capabilities to allow for fluctuation analysis at the group-level rather than only at the GL account level that Variance Analysis provides. FRA also allows explanations provided at the lower levels to be rolled-up to the financial statement level. There are many other use cases for Variance Analysis, such as the GL level for actuals or budgets, and our customers will continue to use the existing solution for those.

What are the key benefits of Financial Reporting Analytics? How does it deliver value?

Financial Reporting Analytics eliminates time previously spent sending emails and spreadsheets to various business units and stakeholders and allows for faster balance sheet and income statement reporting and analysis. FRA gives customers real-time visibility into financial data, gets information into the hands of key stakeholders faster, and allows valuable F&A resources to focus on other key priorities.Financial Reporting Analytics customers have shared that they get complete and real-time financial snapshots that they can review, understand, and sign-off on sooner, adding a new degree of confidence and strengthening governance around another key piece of the record-to-report process.

FINANCIAL REPORTING ANALYTICS

Control, validate, and streamline balance sheet and P&L analyses.

Review and attest to consolidated data with on-demand, end-to-end transparency.

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- The Wall Street Journal

1.6%

of equity value is lost each year from accounting violations.

- Federal Reserve Regulatory Reporting Survey

86%

of firms reported that manual processes continue to be the underlying reason for recurring adjustments made.

- BlackLine Customer Survey

97%

of companies perform flux analysis as part of an important audit control.

Many organizations have streamlined or automated key closing activities, yet the process of consolidating, validating, and analyzing group-level financial data remains a siloed, reactive, and error-prone exercise.

BlackLine Financial Reporting Analytics provides a centralized workspace to perform consolidation activities with end-to-end transparency and automated fluctuation analysis and attestation.

Unify Data & Streamline Workflows

Securely import and map data from your ERP system to your balance sheet and income statement line items, and easily assign ownership of required explanations, reviews, and controls certifications to local business units.

Improve Visibility & Accelerate Reporting

Perform consolidation activities, review financial statements, and execute variance analysis faster and at any level—anytime, anywhere. Report on status, incomplete items, and other KPIs with purpose-built dashboards and reports.

Enhance Control & Decision-Making

Replace error-prone, reactive processes with a proactive, preventive approach that strengthens key controls and enables more timely business insights.

“Combining analytics with a holistic approach to balance sheet management can help capture opportunity and improve performance.”

MCKINSEY

Additional Resources

Control, Validate & Streamline Financial Statement Analyses

Learn how BlackLine Financial Reporting Analytics enables analysis and validation of group-level or consolidated financial data with direct, real-time visibility into the local or underlying details.

Financial Reporting Analytics FAQ

Take a deep dive into the key benefits of Financial Reporting Analytics and how BlackLine customers can use utilize Financial Reporting Analytics alongside their other BlackLine Financial Close Management solutions.

Introducing BlackLine Financial Reporting Analytics

Join this webinar to hear from solution experts about ways Financial Reporting Analytics can streamline your processes and get a demonstration of the solution.

Webinar

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