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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
June 02, 2022
8 minute read
While my current role is SVP of Finance Solutions and Technology at BlackLine, I was previously responsible for global finance transformation and shared services at a Fortune 500 company. While there, I had the unique opportunity to oversee the transformation of our intercompany accounting operations to streamline and automate many of the manual processes—this article will detail what it takes to drive change.
At the Fortune 500 company I worked for, my team and I faced significant hurdles. Our company was operating on about 60 ERPs, which were completely disaggregated, and mostly acquired through acquisition. For many years, the company considered itself a conglomerate, until it decided to take advantage of its size and scale.
My role was to work and partner with the shared services leader at the organization. I made sure I had global process and global technology support for the operation, so everyone could have a say in what investments would ultimately be needed to run shared service centers as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Ultimately, shared services identified intercompany as the number one pain point.
It was slowing our close, it was a source of tax leakage and continuous statutory and tax audits, and intercompany was the cause of many other issues. Additionally, the intercompany balance and resolve issue negatively impacted our broader close optimization strategies as associates worked tirelessly to resolve them during the critical close days instead of during the work period.
It is extremely difficult to work with and reconcile across a landscape of ERPs. The entire process was ripe for optimization. We looked to move that process area from a regional shared service footprint into centralizing the placement of that service within a singular location. Then the technology would be applied on top of it.
I spent years bridging the gap between a traditional CFO community—who were my peers—trying to get them to understand findings, process, data, and technology, and how my team could optimize that to free up capacity, to shift it to more value accretive activities.
It almost goes without saying that making an investment in an intercompany solution has multiple stakeholders. If you take my own specific example, you've got multiple regional stakeholders and then you've got multiple functional stakeholders. These include tax, treasury, and settlement as well as AP and AR.
When my team and I went to sell the idea that something should be done to improve intercompany, we brought tax with us. Tax was totally on board for several reasons.
First, the ability to support evolving statutory regulation around B tax calculations. Then instantiate the aligned transfer pricing strategies, within an application, to ensure that they were adhering to their strategies to effectively land the corporation's effective tax rate to the targets that they expected.
Second, there was a compliance angle that was more from a reporting perspective.
Finally, there was also the internal management value around ensuring the organization’s tax strategies were being adhered to, and the amount of local profit it was representing in each of its local markets was where it anticipated them to be. The goal was to support them with arm’s length transactions—third-party invoicing that would stand up to any local statutory audit.
At the time, I was in an enviable position in that shared services particularly understood the size of the problem. My role was to look at things from end to end. The operational team perceived and understood the issues, but when it got to the stakeholders, they were not aware of the size of the problem.
Something that I think we did well was taking a holistic view of the process. Many people just focus on the upfront transaction, making sure there’s the trading partner’s agreement to allow for reconciliation. However, there are many more strategic components to it.
For example, there’s the tax hedging, netting perspective, which is more of the downstream part of that process. This is also very strategic because many companies, especially when they’re complex, find it very difficult to hedge appropriately if you don’t have a complete picture of your liabilities by currency.
You’re also leaving exposure on the table, which strengthens your risk management from a currency perspective. The shared services leader was partnered with the tax lead. We also had the CFO and treasurer on board. We presented a unified front in terms of articulating what the call to action was and what type of value we could expect to realize from investments.
Speaking of value, and why you need to stress the strategic, there is always the question of “do we want to invest a couple of million dollars here versus throw humans at it?” You have to think of the process from end-to-end and you have to qualify value throughout the process chain. If you look at it too myopically, the investment to the business case, given the cost of labor in some locations, doesn't self-justify easily.
My focus was predominantly on the indirect (non-inventory) to start. In advance of upgrading our technology, we had to custom-build the solution, since at the time, none was available.
We took a single SAP instance and created purchase orders and sales orders to create the preapproval agreements within SAP. The invoice was created there, but we had no backend integration to ensure both sides of the entry were being created across those 60 ERPs.
That’s where BlackLine proved particularly valuable because we already had backend integration through its journal entry workflow product. When it came to trying to automate intercompany, they could do the pre-approval. Then, we could do the pre-approval and use the SAP connector to go back in and post both sides of those journals. With BlackLine’s new intercompany solutions, we could have avoided the custom build and piecemeal solution, but these weren’t yet available.
Understand that, on the process side, we focused on indirect. It already had a process defined, where parties would go into an application to do a pre-approval agreement. Thresholds were identified to eliminate the non-value-added activity. As part of our comprehensive S4 ERP strategy, we aspired to retire our old SAP box that housed the custom solution and transition to a SaaS solution. From a strategic perspective, the businesses realized benefits that include reduced risk and increased visibility into what they’re doing.
This process allowed us to support local statutory profit in a way that's auditable and traceable. It’s reputational. It’s protection of the effective tax rate that actually drops right to the bottom line.
For example, being a US-based company, you might have an effective tax rate in the US if all the income was reported there. You would be at the maximum of the US tax bracketing. Most large multinationals deploy strategies to compliantly optimize their physical and financial flows to effectively reduce points off the maximum by “trapping” profit in lower cost countries. If you start to lose percentage points off that through slippage and leakages, where you fail a statutory audit because you didn’t do things correctly, you didn't use the right transfer price.
In this scenario, you didn’t have the right arm’s length invoice. There is significant risk to overall profitability, not to mention penalties and reputational risk if the company fails a statutory audit. From an executive perspective, those elements would be stressed because the notion of operational efficiency is not emphasized at the C-Suite level. Everything should be aligned more with this notion and concept of continuous accounting, to avoid the mess upfront. It should allow the company to shorten its close cycle and strengthen the overall integrity of external reporting.
A big challenge during this process for me and my team was finding people internally that could architect what the end-to-end was going to look like. The gap we found was that we didn’t have enough solution architects. I admit I would have paid for more capability if I was notified that we had a gap there. More and more, I am a firm believer that global organizations must have a global process owner for intercompany.
There is much to be learned from the companies that are leading the way in this field. Take a conglomerate like GE. They couldn't find anything in the market, so they built their own solution. A handful of the world’s biggest companies have done the same thing.
But once you get below those top 10-15 companies, there’s a huge number of companies that are making do with no visibility, lots of exceptions, out of balances, and tax leakages. And it's those very companies that BlackLine is here to help.