Verity Accruals: From Manual Mess to Automated Success with AI

• Manual accrual processes create significant bottlenecks in the financial close, consuming hundreds of hours, increasing the risk of costly errors, and keeping accounting teams stuck in reactive, low-value work.

• BlackLine Verity Accruals uses purpose-built AI to automate the entire accrual workflow, from data gathering to the creation of journal entries, transforming the accountant's role from data doer to strategic reviewer.

• By implementing AI-powered automation, finance teams can close the books up to three days faster, achieve over 80% automation in their accrual process, and ensure every entry is supported by a transparent, audit-ready trail.

The month-end close is one of the most resource-intensive, error-prone processes in finance and accounting, and accruals are often the biggest bottleneck. Finance teams scramble to gather data from disparate systems, validate thousands of transactions under tight deadlines, and manually enter journal entries.

This pressure cooker environment is not only stressful, but it's also a barrier to strategic progress.

Manual work is prone to errors and missed accruals, which can lead to inaccurate financial statements and introduce risk. This isn't a given; it's a problem AI can help solve.

With Verity Accruals from BlackLine, you can leverage AI-powered finance automation to achieve a faster, more accurate close. Today, we’ll explore how Verity Accruals eliminates the bottlenecks of manual work, showcasing the tangible transformation finance teams experience when they embrace AI-powered automation.

For many finance teams, the accrual process is a recurring nightmare. Accountants are buried in spreadsheets, chasing down data from ERPs, subledgers, and external systems. They spend countless hours chasing vendors for confirmations, manually calculating complex entries, and constantly second-guessing the accuracy of their work.

This manual approach consumes hundreds of hours each month, delays the financial close process, and introduces a significant risk of errors that require costly rework if inaccurate. These errors can cascade into inaccurate financial statements, audit findings, and delayed strategic decisions. All the while, your most talented accounting professionals are stuck executing repetitive tactical tasks, leading to burnout, high turnover, and a team that is perpetually reactive instead of strategic.

Verity Accruals is BlackLine's AI-powered platform that automates accrual workflows from end to end, eliminating manual data gathering, journal entry creation, and validation. The core promise is simple: close your books up to three days faster while ensuring accuracy, auditability, and compliance.

What makes the AI in Verity Accruals so effective is the deep expertise now guiding it. While generic AI tools have a broad focus, Verity AI is purpose-built for the complexities of the close. By integrating BlackLine's two decades of experience and insights from over 4,000 customers, we've created intelligent automation designed by accountants, for accountants, that adapts to your specific workflows and gets smarter with every close.

Automatic Data Ingestion

Verity Accruals connects directly to your ERPs, subledgers, and other source systems to automatically pull in the data needed for accruals. This eliminates hours of data gathering and ensures you’re always working with complete, up-to-date information, making financial close optimization a reality.

AI-Powered Draft Journal Entries

Using multiple AI models, Verity Accruals analyzes historical patterns, business rules, and current data to generate draft journal entries with supporting documentation. Your team shifts from creating entries from scratch to reviewing AI-generated recommendations, dramatically reducing manual effort while maintaining complete control over the accrual automation process.

Multi-Model AI Validation

Verity Accruals employs several AI models that work together to validate accuracy, flag uncertainties, and identify anomalies that require human review. This allows you to catch errors before they reach your general ledger, maintain an unbreakable audit trail, and increase confidence in your accrual accuracy.

Seamless ERP Integration

Pre-built connectors ensure a secure and reliable data flow between Verity Accruals and major ERP systems. This allows for quick implementation, maintains data integrity, and enables you to post validated journal entries directly back to your ERP with full traceability.

Before: The Manual Accrual Nightmare

Your senior accountant arrives on Monday to fragmented data extracts, incomplete vendor responses, and a massive spreadsheet waiting to be reconciled. By Wednesday, the entire team is working late, manually calculating complex entries and scrambling to meet audit documentation requirements. This process consumes three to five days, leaving the door open for errors that only surface during the audit.

After: The Verity Accruals Advantage

Now, picture that same accountant logging into Verity Accruals to find AI-generated draft journal entries already prepared, validated, and ready for review. By Tuesday afternoon, all accruals are reviewed, approved, and posted with complete audit documentation automatically generated. The result is three days saved on the month-end close, zero manual data entry, up to an 80% automation rate, and an accounting team focused on strategic analysis.

With Verity Accruals, accountants transform from "data doers" to "data reviewers" and strategic advisors. Your team can now spend their time investigating meaningful exceptions, advising on financial impacts, and driving process improvements instead of calculating complex journal entries. This shift reduces stress, improves work-life balance, and provides the opportunity to develop strategic skills that advance careers. This is a natural complement to tools like account reconciliation software.

• Proven Results: Finance teams using Verity Accruals close up to three days faster while achieving up to 80% automation rates.

• Audit-Ready AI: Every AI decision includes a complete audit trail with explainable logic and supporting documentation that will stand up to the toughest audit scrutiny.

• Built for Scale: Verity Accruals scales seamlessly with your business, whether you manage one entity or one hundred.

• Purpose-Built by Finance and Accounting Experts: Created by accountants who understand the month-end close, not generic automation tools adapted for finance.

Manual accrual processes create bottlenecks, errors, and stress. Verity Accruals automates the heavy lifting, freeing your team to focus on what matters: analyzing results, advising the business, and driving strategic value. Cutting three days from your close means faster reporting, better decision-making, and a finance team that operates as a true strategic partner.

Ready to see Verity Accruals in action? Schedule a personalized demo today to discover how AI-powered automation can transform your accrual process and accelerate your financial close.

1. How does Verity Accruals reduce close time?

Verity Accruals automates the most time-consuming parts of the accrual process, including data gathering, vendor confirmation, and journal entry creation. This can reduce the time spent on accruals by up to 80%, allowing teams to close the books up to three days faster.

2. Is AI-powered accrual automation audit-ready?

Yes. Verity Accruals is built specifically for the rigor of finance. It automatically builds a complete, transparent audit trail for every AI-generated entry. The AI logs every action, starting from the initial data extraction right through to the final vendor confirmation email. It then attaches all supporting documentation directly to the proposed journal entry, making the auditor's review fast and straightforward.

3. What ERP systems does Verity Accruals integrate with?

Verity Accruals is designed to integrate seamlessly with major ERP systems through pre-built connectors, ensuring secure and reliable data flow without the need for custom development.

4. How does Verity Accruals handle complex or unusual accruals?

Verity acts as an extension of your team to investigate complex entries. Because it continuously pulls data from your source systems, it identifies potential accruals that manual processes easily miss. For complex scenarios requiring external context, the AI automatically emails business partners and third parties to confirm details. It intelligently interprets their replies and calculates the final proposed amount for your team’s review.

5. What is the implementation process for Verity Accruals?

BlackLine's implementation process is designed to be quick and efficient. With pre-built connectors and a team of experts to guide you, you can get up and running on Verity Accruals with minimal disruption to your existing workflows.

6. How is the AI in Verity Accruals different from generic AI tools?

Generic AI platforms require extensive training to understand finance. The AI in Verity Accruals is already an expert. It’s purpose-built for accounting and enriched by BlackLine's deep expertise, meaning it already knows how to apply the right business rules and navigate your unique financial processes.