Are you 7 metrics away from future-ready
financial operations?

Why it's important:
Many businesses don’t realize just how much time is squandered downloading, importing, and analyzing financial close data so that it’s ready to process. 

Consider your bank reconciliations: downloading statements into a spreadsheet,
adding some filtering, some conditional formatting, maybe lookup tables—each step
takes valuable time.

This aggregation of marginal losses is often a huge—unseen—competitive impediment that slows the business down and makes streamlining operations feel impossible. Plus, consider the increased risk that’s introduced with each added manual handling step.

What’s possible:
Using a platform like BlackLine, you’ll have access to connectors that allow you to grab data (in a BAI file for example) and pull that directly into the platform. All that data processing will only ever need to be done once to set it up. From that point on, when you import your data, it’ll be automatically processed for you based on your preferences.


BlackLine has opened up a whole new world for us. It’s so much easier for accounting to put data into a format that finance can easily use. It also enables us to give our CFO more up-to-date information, which in turn helps him make better decisions for BCU.

Accounting Manager:

Why it's important:
Reconciliation at the transaction level often involves a lot of slow, manual handling. This drags efficiency, increases risk, and can seriously damage morale. 

The finance and accounting experts you hire want to spend their time on the interesting stuff: the anomalies, exceptions, and opportunities that actually leverage their skills. If they’re bogged down with manually matching all transactions, they’re going to find their jobs much less enjoyable. 

And there’s nothing that tanks operational efficiency and squanders competitive potential quite like talented folks feeling disengaged with their work.

What’s possible:
The right financial operations platform will allow your teams to leverage their skills and provide your business with more value. BlackLine customers achieve this with our Transaction Matching feature. 

It works a little like this: BlackLine ingests detailed data from different sources and automatically matches these transactions in your account reconciliations, so all you need to do is focus on the anomalies and exceptions.

Why it's important:
A heavy reliance on manual journal entries is a big risk indicator and a definite sign that your financial operations aren’t scalable. Getting a handle on the number of manual journal entries gives you a quantifiable metric to assess the efficiency of the financial close process.

What’s possible:
Businesses can use financial operations solutions to centralize and automate the creation, validation, review, and posting of most journal entries. They can even eradicate unnecessary journal entries. 

For example, BlackLine’s Journal Entry solution gives businesses direct integration with core systems like ERPs to pull information and post journal entries. It centralizes journal entry management, and offers an integrated control framework including thresholds and user roles.

The efficiency gains speak for themselves. Unconvinced? Read more about how we helped a customer achieve a 97% journal automation rate here.

Why it's important:
The cost of processing a journal entry includes the time your teams spend on all activities related to it (using software and other resources etc). 

Understanding the number of low-value journal entries (e.g. those for under $250 or below your company’s materiality threshold) is going to help you throw the spotlight on a major source of operational inefficiency. Such journals are typically not required by a business's standard operational procedures, and often cost more to process than the journal entry’s actual value.

What’s possible:
The right financial operations software can help you implement a materiality threshold to minimize low-value entries. This helps you refocus your team’s time on high-value activities, like strategic planning. 

On the next page, we explore how BlackLine’s AI-powered Journals Risk Analyser helps businesses get the mission-critical intelligence they need on their journal entries.

Why it's important:
Monthly recurring manual journal entries (such as accruals, depreciation, amortization, and allocations) can be a particularly frustrating resource drain. 

These entries often follow a regular schedule and are for consistent amounts. This makes these journal entries prime candidates for automation. Understanding how many of these journal entries you have shows the potential for operational efficiencies.

What’s possible:
Because of their repetitive nature, recurring manual journal entries can be easily automated. With BlackLine, recurring manual journal entries are easy to set up, clone, and automate. And with our Account Reconciliations solution, users get access to templates that automatically calculate things like amortized amounts.

Why it's important:
Depending on the size of your organization and the efficiency of your financial close processes, responding to audit requests can add up to a matter of seconds or hundreds of hours every quarter. 

If your systems are fragmented, you rely heavily on manual data entry, and you need to go searching through various file locations for supporting documents—you're going to chew up some serious time. 

It’s also going to increase the risk of errors. All of this is going to make it harder to ensure you have accurate supporting documentation for compliance.

What’s possible:
Businesses using BlackLine can store and gain easy access to supporting documentation at the item or account level. This eradicates the need to trawl through multiple locations looking for the data they need.

BlackLine also ensures that the easy access to supporting documentation doesn’t come with a security tradeoff. It logs the uploading user’s name and the time and date of entry, so that no one else can edit information. Plus, BlackLine customers can also grant read-only access to auditors, which allows auditors to self-serve the information they need.

Why it's important:
An added inefficiency at the heart of chaotic financial close processes is the amount of time teams spend juggling apps, rather than putting their F&A skills to use. So finding a single solution that can cover all your financial close needs is going to have a serious impact on your operational efficiency, operational expenses, and your working capital. 

The more your company has to move data from system to system and reconcile information across sources, the more you’re going to increase your operational risk too. This is how errors go undetected or unintentional errors occur.