When the company decided to take better care of itself by undertaking a company-wide transformation of financial processes, BlackLine was a key part of their strategy.

At the time, British Gas was working with a third-party outsourcer to reconcile nearly 1,000 accounts each month. Reconciliations and reporting were performed manually, slowing down processes and hampering visibility into finances. The company hoped to improve efficiencies and reduce financial risk by standardizing its account reconciliation and close processes.

For John Dickens, British Gas’ head of finance operations, limitations of the spreadsheet-based accounting processes proved frustrating.

“The only way to summarize items under investigation or track failures was to open every rec individually and then re-key the data into another spreadsheet. It was very time-consuming,” he says.

In the same way, accounting team members from the outsourcer were frequently bogged down by having to check for completeness of reconciliations, an expensive waste of professionals’ time.

British Gas decided to implement BlackLine Account Reconciliations, Transaction Matching, and Task Management:

• Account Reconciliations increases efficiency and tightens controls by replacing manual processes with automation

• Transaction Matching streamlines and automates detail-heavy reconciliations, such as bank reconciliations, credit card matching, intercompany reconciliations, and invoice-to-PO matching

• Task Management automates the processes for assigning, controlling, and monitoring close processes and checklists