With a finance team of over 700 employees, Carolyn found that managing the financial close and ensuring SOX compliance across such a massive and complex organization was a monumental task. The team relied on a mix of manual processes, emails, and Excel spreadsheets, which created a lack of visibility and made it difficult to track the status of reconciliations and compliance tasks. This manual approach was not only inefficient but also introduced risk, as there was no single source of truth for their close process.

To modernize their financial operations, Carolyn turned to BlackLine to standardize and automate Delta’s substantiation processes. By implementing BlackLine for account reconciliations and compliance management, Delta was able to replace its manual, binder-based system with a unified platform that provided real-time visibility into the close. Carolyn can now track the status of over 40,000 reconciliations and 60,000 quarterly and monthly SOX tasks, all in one place. This has not only improved efficiency but has also significantly strengthened their control environment.

Domino’s processes more than 40 million transactions every month, and in the past, teams spent a significant amount of their time and effort in spreadsheets.

Sarah knew they should be spending more time investigating exceptions because that’s where the real insight comes from. Plus, she wanted the opportunity to provide better support and advice for the rest of the organization. But because of the sheer volume of transactions and the team’s manual processes, they simply didn’t have time.

As part of a review of their overall electronic payments, Domino’s realized there was a significant opportunity to improve their transaction matching process.

“When we saw the capabilities that BlackLine had to offer, we found that it was the most robust, and that’s why we chose to expand into transaction matching.”

Once BlackLine Transaction Matching was fully implemented, Domino’s was able to automatically match 99.9% of their 40 million transactions every month.

BlackLine afforded Sarah the ability to change the type of work she and her team does. These days, she’s able to proactively look at what’s going on with the numbers and provide operations teams with quick analysis and support of what’s happening. It’s allowed her to be a much better partner for the rest of the organization.

Nucleus Research’s annual ROI awards recognize end-user organizations whose deployments of specific IT solutions have achieved exceptional financial and business results. By partnering with BlackLine, Red Wing Shoes became the 2020 winner of the award. 

“What I like about BlackLine is that it creates an opportunity to drive innovation for the team. We can be more analytical and provide value to our business partners. Ultimately, we get better financial insight to support better business decisions,” notes Holly Mudgett, Director, Corporate Accounting & Business Systems, Red Wing Shoes.

Red Wing Shoes currently distributes its products to over 100 countries and over 4,000 US retail locations, including company-owned, dealer-owned, and branded stores. But the company was using Excel spreadsheets and email to manage its day-to-day accounting activities. This led to a lack of standardization and controls. And as Red Wing grew, its financial processes became increasingly inefficient and laborious.

Red Wing Shoes began searching for a dedicated financial close and consolidation (FCC) software solution in 2017. 

The non-negotiables were:

1. Organizational visibility and consolidation of all its financial processes and data into a single location.
   

2. Standardization and controls over workflows.
   

3. A seamless user interface and intuitive guided workflows to reduce labor and time input.
   

After assessing the market, they found a solution that could meet these needs. BlackLine’s ability to create account and cost center combination groupings allowed Red Wing to cut the number of monthly account reconciliations they needed to perform by over 7,000. The bottom line: A huge $1.2 million in annual savings through new productivity, efficiency, and visibility.

In 2015, H.J. Heinz Company and Kraft Foods Group merged, adding a lot of complexity for the newly combined accounting and finance function.

Post merger, the company had to navigate $20-30 million in intercompany discrepancies between payables and receivables across multiple entities.

The process of reconciling these intercompany transactions was “uncoordinated, uncontrolled, extremely manual, and very complex,” according to Paul Dubbelman, Finance Lead, Global Business Services, at Kraft Heinz. He knew the company “needed a much better solution to bring those millions of dollars in discrepancies down to a manageable number.”

With BlackLine Intercompany solutions put in place, Kraft Heinz has cut intercompany discrepancies in non-product invoices ranging from $20 million to $30 million a month.

BlackLine gave Paul and his team increased visibility across non-product transactions so personnel can quickly identify, examine, and resolve exceptions. BlackLine’s support was instrumental in rearchitecting processes and solving unique challenges. The results? Increased confidence in financial data while simultaneously freeing staff to focus on value-added work.

Northern Oil and Gas (NOG), an energy platform that experienced explosive growth from a $30 million to over $3 billion market cap, found its manual accounting processes could no longer keep pace. Chad came to the realization that the financial close could stretch to 25 days, relying on cumbersome, Excel-based workflows that created bottlenecks and risk. A massive 45-tab Excel workbook for the statement of cash flows, which took two full days to prepare, perfectly illustrated the inefficiency that the lean accounting team was facing.

Chad implemented a full suite of BlackLine solutions to create a unified, future-proof platform for NOG’s financial close.

This “big bang” approach went live in just three months and delivered immediate results. The once-dreaded statement of cash flows is now 95% automated, and bank reconciliations are 100% automated. By embracing automation, NOG transformed its finance function from a reactive cost center into a strategic partner, freeing up the team to focus on higher-value analysis and future innovation.