Saving Over 24 Hours While Driving Accuracy, Efficiency, and Innovation
Jemena is an Australian energy infrastructure company that owns and operates a diverse portfolio of energy assets across the country and serves millions of homes and businesses. With a strong focus on safety, reliability, and innovation, Jemena, alongside their service delivery arm, Zinfra, plays a critical role in delivering essential energy services and supporting the transition to a cleaner energy future.
The Challenge
Behind the scenes, Jemena recognised their finance processes, particularly around month-end journals, were highly manual, time-consuming, and prone to error. Legacy processes involved Excel spreadsheets with hundreds of thousands of rows, manual pivots, external links, and multiple hours to prepare each journal entry. According to Michelle Vawdrey, Head of Finance - Zinfra, “this created risk, limited insight, and left little time for value-added analysis.”
When the Finance team identified a potential $24 million direct impact on the revenue line, they knew something needed to change. That meant moving away from spreadsheets and embracing automation and control.
Why BlackLine
Jemena originally partnered with BlackLine to streamline and standardise account reconciliations, improve reporting integrity, and enhance visibility. Seeing the benefits Blackline brought to the account reconciliation processes, the team at Jemena saw further opportunities to expand their use of the platform and automate month-end journal processes, enabling more time to analyse and understand results before month-end close.
Working with Deloitte and BlackLine, Jemena focused on automating highcomplexity, high-effort journal entries. According to Vawdrey, “Our goal was clear: reduce processing time, improve accuracy, and enable our people to focus on what matters—understanding and driving performance.” They aimed to “flip the triangle” to build financial processes where BlackLine does 80% of the work, and Jemena 20%.
The Results
To create the most impact, Jemena started with ten key journals that were either high in complexity or very time-consuming. With Transaction Matching and Journal Entry, Jemena set up configurable rules to automatically compare and match large data sets and automatically create related journal entries. One example of a process that Jemena automated was a WIP journal that was previously calculated using a spreadsheet with more than two hundred thousand rows of data, numerous pivot tables, links to external files, and manual steps that all contributed to an increased risk of error. Now, data from multiple sources are loaded into BlackLine and automatically matched if it meets pre-set criteria to be classified as WIP. Unmatched transactions are then created to be posted, and reconciling items are sent to the related account reconciliation.
The result is accurate, efficient processes. According to Vawdrey, “We transformed multi-hour processes into workflows that now take considerably less time to run. Our new automated process integrates seamlessly with our existing account reconciliations, and we've built in controls, testing, and audit trails that elevate our financial governance.” The first ten use cases automated through BlackLine have saved Jemena’s team over 24 hours in manual processing alone.
Jemena’s approach to transformation was collaborative and sustainable. “It was very important to us that our team understood how to build and maintain the use cases in BlackLine so that we could continue rolling out additional use cases after the initial implementation. We didn’t just implement a solution—we upskilled our internal teams, created sandbox environments for learning, and reduced reliance on external support over time.”
Finance transformation is a continuous journey. Jemena continues to expand their use of BlackLine with a further twenty-five use cases currently being automated, while continuing to encourage their finance teams to identify further automation opportunities across the business.
Jemena’s finance transformation embodies what modern accounting should be— digital, scalable, people-driven, and insight-focused.
Computer Software & Services
SAP
APAC
Midsize
Increased accuracy and minimised risk
Saved time and increased capacity to focus on analysis
Built a culture of continuous innovation
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