When Andy Young joined Beauty Pie as Financial Controller, he found a small dedicated team trying to keep up with manually reconciling an increasing number of transactions. "The business had grown, but the team hadn't been able to grow with it. A lot of controls were manual, and processes were sometimes haphazard." 

The team was processing in excess of 100,000 transactions a month and performing a three-way match manually in spreadsheets. "We had a huge volume of transactions, and it was extremely time consuming and manual to reconcile one of the big balance sheet accounts," says Young. "Whilst we knew things were OK, as the balance sheet account reconciled, we didn't know what was going on under the bonnet. If something didn't match, we didn't know why. We couldn't identify what the issues were." 

In the search for a solution that would offer both automation and increased visibility, the team considered BlackLine and two other vendors. 

"One vendor was very expensive and seemed like they'd never handled similar transaction matching before. They promised they could do it, but it was all AI-based, didn't seem proven and seemed like implementation would take much longer," says Young. "The other vendor was similar to BlackLine, but in the end, it came down to BlackLine's price, experience, speed of implementation and reputation." 

The team implemented BlackLine Transaction Matching. "I'm a bit of a geek with technology," says Young. "Beyond the weekly calls with BlackLine, that taught us how import definitions and matching rules worked, we were fairly self-sufficient."