Billion-Dollar Media Group Boosts Accounting Efficiency & Process Integrity with BlackLine

Helsinki-based Sanoma Corporation, a large consumer media and educational publisher, prides itself on offering meaningful content to customers, providing marketing solutions to advertisers, and—a core company value—operating with efficiency.

That’s why Sanoma decided to replace its old accounting workflow software and manual month-end close processes with a finance controls and automation platform.

Before BlackLine, the company was having trouble reconciling its 8,500 accounts each month with a 50-person finance team. The team’s stress was high during the close, and countless spreadsheet reconciliations weren’t helping.

Accounting programs crashed when more than one accountant tried to access the same file at once, for instance. Team members felt they were spending too much time on repetitive tasks, like manually moving data to different spreadsheets or checking for double entries.

As a result, they didn’t have time for financial analysis and counsel, functions that would bring more value to the company.

Sanoma wanted an automated, end-to-end reconciliation solution, and found it in BlackLine. BlackLine’s ability to integrate with various source systems gave Sanoma valuable process integrity by providing an overview of previously-matched transactions and the status of account certifications.

The company chose BlackLine Smart Close for SAP, since Sanoma uses an SAP ERP system. After their initial pilot, Sanoma also added BlackLine’s Transaction Matching and Journal Entry solutions.

Since then, financial close efficiency and process integrity have greatly improved. Sanoma’s accounting team has cut time spent on manual reconciliations by 83% and is now automating 87% of monthly account reconciliations.

The change has lifted department morale, too. Teams no longer need to work overtime for the monthly close, and finance and accounting experts are able to apply their skills to more value-added activities.

Read the full story to learn more about how Sanoma achieved a smoother and more accurate close.