What is Verity™ Accruals? An Introduction to AI-Powered Accrual Automation

The month-end close is a familiar pressure point for finance and accounting professionals. It’s a period often marked by long hours, manual work, and the high-stakes pursuit of accuracy as teams navigate everything from vendor invoice and payment discrepancies to shifting regulations. A major bottleneck in this process is accrual accounting, a critical but often time-consuming task still heavily reliant on spreadsheets and manual follow-ups.

This outdated reliance on manual work not only slows growth and obscures visibility into your financials, but it also fundamentally limits your ability to respond to the needs of the business in real time and forces highly skilled professionals to spend their time on low-value, repetitive tasks.

BlackLine Verity™ Accruals, an AI-powered solution, provides a digital workforce to automate complex, judgment-based accrual processes. This "digital workforce" is far more than simple automation. It’s comprised of sophisticated AI agents that execute end-to-end tasks, from data collection to final journal entry creation.

The first available solutions in this family, born from the powerful AI capabilities acquired from WiseLayer, are Verity Vendor Accruals and Verity Payroll Accruals, each designed to tackle a specific, high-impact use case.

At its core, accrual accounting is a fundamental concept that ensures revenues and expenses are recognized in the period in which they are earned or incurred, regardless of when cash is exchanged. This adherence to the matching principle provides a more accurate and transparent picture of a company's financial performance and is a strict requirement under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).

The process involves identifying and accounting for a wide range of financial activities, including vendor accruals for unpaid invoices, payroll accruals for earned wages, accrued revenue for services completed but not yet billed, and various interest and tax accruals.

However, the manual process of identifying unrecorded transactions, calculating estimates, and creating journal entries is often inefficient and prone to error, which can prevent the accurate and timely closing of the books.

The traditional, manual approach to accruals is unsustainable in the modern business environment, creating significant risk and inefficiency. The core challenges are deeply rooted in outdated processes and a lack of intelligent technology:

• Fragmented Systems: In most organizations, critical data is siloed across multiple, disconnected systems like procurement tools, HR platforms, and ERPs. This fragmentation forces accountants to manually consolidate information, which is not only inefficient but also significantly increases the risk of error during data transfer.

• Inaccurate and Incomplete Data: Manual work is inherently prone to costly errors, where even a misplaced decimal in an accrual calculation can lead to material misstatements. Teams also struggle to collect timely information from other departments, resulting in delays and incomplete data that further compromise accuracy.

• Time-Consuming Manual Work: The process often relies on spreadsheets, which forces teams to spend significant time on repetitive, low-value tasks like data entry and reconciliation. This manual effort diverts focus from strategic analysis and contributes to a high-stress close period that stretches for a week or more.

• Difficult Estimations: Estimating expenses without a formal invoice is a major challenge that requires significant and often frustrating follow-up with vendors and internal budget owners. This makes it difficult to calculate accruals with consistency and confidence each period.

• Compliance and Audit Risks: Manual processes often lack a clear, easily accessible audit trail. An inability to quickly produce supporting documentation, like a purchase order or email confirmation for an accrual, can challenge audit approval and increase the risk of non-compliance with regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX).

The vision behind Verity Accruals was born from a simple yet powerful idea: using AI to “take the preparation work off the accountant's plate.” In an era facing a structural talent gap in accounting, where the next generation of professionals expects to work with cutting-edge technology, this vision is more relevant than ever.

This allows highly skilled teams to finally break free from the drudgery of manual tasks and focus on the strategic initiatives that drive company growth and create real value.

Verity Accruals provides a true digital workforce that automates the entire accruals process, from start to finish, through a series of intelligent, interconnected steps:

1. Data Collection: It seamlessly integrates with your existing source systems—including ERPs, P2P platforms, and HR tools—to automatically extract, aggregate, and organize all relevant data into a single, intelligent workspace. This eliminates risky manual data consolidation and creates a reliable single source of truth.

2. Calculate Accruals: The AI engine analyzes historical data and transaction patterns to proactively flag items that likely require an accrual. It then applies accounting-specific and judgment-based logic to automatically calculate a proposed accrual amount based on all available information, including contracts, past invoices, and email confirmations.

3. Identify Unrecorded Transactions: For complex accruals that require confirmation, the "Intelligent Communication" feature acts as an automated agent, initiating outreach to both internal and external stakeholders to confirm unrecorded activities and gather missing details. It intelligently tracks email responses and incorporates the confirmed information directly into the accrual calculation.

4. Create Journal Entry: Finally, Verity Accruals prepares a complete, audit-ready draft journal entry formatted specifically for your ERP, including flagging it for automated reversal in the next period. All supporting documentation and communications are centralized to create a complete and defensible audit trail.

The value of Verity Accruals isn't theoretical; it’s demonstrated through concrete, real-world results and built on a foundation of unshakeable trust.

Drive Real-World Results

Early adopters of Verity Accruals are not just closing faster; they are fundamentally transforming their finance operations. One mid-sized customer noted savings of $200,000 per year simply by reallocating their team’s capacity away from manual accruals.

Across the board, clients see impressive results:

• Reduce Accrual Time by up to 80%

• Achieve a 3+ Day Faster Financial Close

• Get Up and Running in Under a Week

Built on a Foundation of Trust

We understand the fear of AI "hallucinations," which is why Verity Accruals was built to be exceptionally accurate and reliable. It uses a multimodal approach, where any decision the AI makes is run through at least two different AI models for verification. If there is any disagreement, the item is flagged for human review. This ensures the highest level of accuracy and keeps you, the user, fully in the driver's seat.

We don’t just sell this technology—we trust it and run on it ourselves. As a market leader in accounting technology, our own finance team is leveraging this suite of products. We used Verity Accruals for their own close process, validating its effectiveness against the highest possible standards and proving that the technology delivers on its promise.

Ready to see your new digital workforce in action? See how the Verity Accruals digital workforce transforms a manual risk into an automated, auditable process that frees your team for more strategic work.