Unifying Your Technology Stack Across Record-to-Report

We recently sat down with Wendy Peck, BlackLine’s Director of Strategy, Financial Reporting Analytics, to talk about challenges in record-to-report (R2R) and how unifying the tech stack can help companies overcome them.

Q: What are the top 5 record-to-report challenges facing modern finance teams?

A: Finance and accounting teams today face five common challenges within the R2R process. They often overlap, so solving them can involve addressing multiple areas simultaneously.

1. Strengthen Balance Sheet Health Through Real-Time Visibility

   One of the most frequent goals we hear from accounting teams is the desire to improve balance sheet health. In these cases, organizations often turn to solutions that unify account reconciliations with financial analysis. By combining these capabilities, they gain a complete, real-time view of the balance sheet, allowing for more accurate and confident reporting.

2. Accelerate the Financial Close and Ensure Compliance

   Many teams are focused on accelerating their financial close while also ensuring compliance with regulatory and internal reporting standards. They often come to us after encountering issues that have slowed down their close or created risks in their reporting process.

3. Empower Strategic Decisions with AI-Driven Insights

   Another growing priority is leveraging AI to enhance decision-making. Teams want to spend less time manually digging through numbers and more time delivering value-added analysis, like variance explanations and trend commentary. For example, if a balance jumps 20% in a period, AI can recognize trends and suggest related explanations, like an expected sudden rise in cash. AI can surface trends, anomalies, and risk patterns faster, enabling quicker and more strategic responses.

4. Drive Efficiency and Optimize Costs

   Efficiency and cost control go hand in hand. Many companies look to streamline operations by reducing the number of tools in their tech stack while increasing the usage and ROI of the ones they retain. Others seek to optimize their existing team size without sacrificing performance, commonly known as doing more with less.

5. Enable Scalable and Sustainable Growth

   This final challenge is especially common among high-growth or PE/VC-backed companies that need scalable systems. Teams migrating from Excel or entry-level close tools, like FloQast, often discover their current setup can't scale with the demands of a growing business. A more unified and automated approach to R2R saves time and creates a solid foundation for long-term, sustainable growth.

Q: What are the benefits in R2R of unifying a tech stack?

A: When we talk to clients about unifying their tech stack, one of the key benefits we focus on is what I like to call drillability. It’s the ability to move seamlessly from a high-level number, like total cash, down into the details behind it.

For example, I’ll talk about a company I worked with recently that had 394 entities that all rolled up into aggregates and financial statements.

Let’s say you’re looking at a consolidated cash figure. That one number might represent cash and cash equivalents across all those different entities, split across various business units, geographies, currencies, and general ledger accounts. Without a unified system, analyzing a fluctuation in that cash figure can be incredibly time-consuming. You’d need to contact a lot of people, who then must dig into their respective work, ERPs, and subledgers to gather the information needed to help explain the change.

When your tech stack is unified—from reconciliations all the way through to financial reporting—you can go from the top-level financial statements straight to the root cause of a fluctuation with just a few clicks. You can instantly identify which entity and which GL accounts are driving the difference.  More importantly, the work performed earlier in the process, like explaining entity balance variances, is also easily accessible by various teams, like group accounting teams.

And when AI is layered in, it adds intelligence and summarization to that drill-down process. The system can automatically detect a variance, alert the right person, and even surface the related accounts and a preliminary explanation, often pulled straight from the reconciliation.

I remember working with another company and trying to investigate a major fluctuation in consolidated cash. First, I had to figure out which entity caused it, then which GL accounts, and then reach out to someone for answers. It could take hours. Today, with a unified tech stack, that same process takes seconds. The person responsible is already alerted, has completed the reconciliation, and can immediately pull the context needed, without starting from scratch.

That’s the power of unification. It simplifies processes, accelerates insight, and reduces the manual effort teams are used to.

Q: What are some risks for companies without unified tech stacks?

A: When finance and accounting teams operate without a unified tech stack, they face several operational and strategic risks, many of which can compound over time.

• Data Inconsistency

  One of the biggest issues is data inconsistency. When systems like the ERP, consolidation tools, reconciliation software, and reporting platforms are disconnected, it’s incredibly easy for data to fall out of sync.

  I’ve seen this firsthand: a number changes in the ERP, but because the consolidation system was locked or hadn’t refreshed due to an integration delay, the updated figure didn’t flow through. We didn’t know something had changed, so we were basing our explanations and analysis on stale data. Without real-time integration and alerts, you can easily end up repeating work, or worse, missing critical fluctuations entirely.

• Inefficiency

  Another major risk is inefficiency and wasted effort. When systems are siloed, teams often have to manually extract, transform, and reconcile data across platforms just to get a basic understanding of what’s happening. That manual effort slows down the financial close and increases the chance of human error. It also puts a significant burden on already stretched teams, leading to late nights, burnout, and difficulty retaining talent.

• Compliance Issues

  There’s also the risk of missed compliance issues or audit red flags. If reconciliations, adjustments, and approvals are spread across disconnected tools or in spreadsheets, it becomes difficult to demonstrate proper controls, governance, and traceability. This lack of visibility can expose the business to compliance risks and make audits more painful and time-consuming.

  In contrast, when your tech stack is unified, everything flows together, from transactional data to financial reporting. If a number changes upstream, the system not only updates it throughout, but also flags it for review, helping teams respond quickly and appropriately.

Q: How does a team evaluate the need for a unified tech stack?

A: For me, the recommendation is to run a workshop. Map out the process, identify how many people are involved, and extrapolate the time and value a solution would offer.

One of the things I used to do in my own business is run a time and motion study with a cross-section of the team. For example, when we were considering implementing Reconciliations with BlackLine, I picked five or six team members with different skill levels, roles, and even distances from the printer, just to see how long it actually took them to complete a reconciliation.

We repeated the same approach when we looked at automating journal entries, and again when we introduced Consolidation Integrity Manager. The idea was to measure how long it really takes to carry out core functions, whether it was gathering commentary or completing a consolidation task.

And because I’m skeptical by nature, like most accountants, we’d also cut the recorded time in half, just to be conservative, and then extrapolate those numbers to understand the bigger picture. Even with that level of prudence, the results still showed clear, measurable value.

One more thing we did was intentionally tweak the ROI assumptions downward. For example, if our model said ROI is less than a year, we made sure the inputs were as grounded as possible. When I was on the other side, evaluating business cases, I was always skeptical of claims that promised ROI in under 12 months. So we tried to make our numbers bulletproof—realistic, believable, and hard to poke holes in.

Q: How does unifying your tech stack with BlackLine improve financial data accuracy?

A: It gives you the confidence that everything, from your most granular GL data to your fully consolidated financials, is housed in one place. That end-to-end visibility ensures you're not working with disconnected numbers or outdated reports. Because the data is integrated and updated in real time, you have transparency throughout the process and the assurance that your numbers are accurate and aligned across all levels.

Q: How does unifying your tech stack with BlackLine improve operational efficiency and workflows?

A: A unified tech stack means that any time a number changes, whether it improves or creates a new issue, everyone who needs to know is automatically alerted. That eliminates the back-and-forth emails, instant messages, phone calls, and text messages just to chase down data or figure out what's changed.

And just as important, it streamlines how teams respond. In the past, over half the responses we got from our subsidiaries weren’t actionable. Not because people didn’t care, but because they didn’t have the time or context to dig deeper. We'd get answers like, “Yes, the number changed,” which we already knew. What we really needed was meaningful commentary.

By reducing the manual effort and giving teams more time to focus on value-added work, a unified stack enables them to provide better, more thoughtful responses. And that’s where the real efficiency gains show up.

Q: How does unifying your tech stack with BlackLine improve compliance?

A: When your tech stack is unified, you gain full auditability and traceability, from the source data all the way through to your consolidated results. Every step is captured: journal entries, transaction matching, reconciliations, commentary, approvals—it's all connected and visible.

That end-to-end transparency gives auditors immediate confidence. With built-in version control, workflow automation, and formal sign-offs, there’s a clear record of who did what, when, and why. For example, in our matching scenarios, the data is verified, validated, and signed off, so there’s no room for ambiguity or second-guessing.

As a result, auditors can focus on confirming that the system operates effectively, rather than having to chase down whether individual team members followed the correct procedures. It significantly simplifies and strengthens your compliance posture.

Unifying your technology stack across record-to-report (R2R) isn’t just modernization—it’s a strategic leap. Today’s finance leaders need more than accurate reporting. They need real-time visibility, regulatory confidence, and the agility to drive strategic outcomes. That requires a connected, intelligent R2R ecosystem.

BlackLine delivers exactly that. Purpose-built to unify financial operations, it connects data, teams, and processes across the entire R2R cycle. With automation, embedded controls, and AI-powered insights, BlackLine empowers you to deliver accuracy, enhance efficiency, and unlock intelligence across your financial operations to deliver the strategic value your business demands.