Liberty had relied on an in-house substantiation and attestation tool, Account Management System (AMS), for years. Yet as business requirements changed and financial controls became a key focus, leadership realized that instead of custom building AMS we should find the best in the market tool for financial controls and to modernize our finance environment.

“With AMS, it was rather difficult to meet, with a high confidence level, all attestation requirements. People would tick a box that an account had been attested to after a reconciliation was performed manually, printed and signed,” says Lisa Bird, lead specialist internal financial control at Liberty. “We also needed a solution that could handle profit-center accounting, which was required as part of our Finance Architecture program.”

Ms. Bird, and her team were “under a huge amount of pressure” to replace the outdated AMS tool—and to enable modernize financial hygiene and a best practice financial control environment.

“We needed to improve the efficiency, accountability, and control of the balance sheet account substantiating process and the reporting across the Liberty Group Finance function. We also wanted to ensure transparency, better governance, and control across the entire record-to-report process.”

After reviewing numerous systems, the team selected BlackLine’s Account Reconciliations and Variance Analysis modules.

“BlackLine came out on top. The entire reconciliation could be done in BlackLine, which would give us more visibility and transparency. We would finally know when reconciliations were complete and there was a direct connection between SAP and BlackLine which would ensure completeness of accounts, says Bird. “And in thinking about the business case, we love that all the modules were integrated.”

Liberty implemented BlackLine even though one of Liberty’s shareholders was using a competitor’s system.

“We looked closely at a competitor’s platform because we wanted to align to our shareholder. But that platform didn’t seem to be as sophisticated or as advanced as BlackLine,” says Bird. “We realized early on that it would have required more development, customization, and testing, whereas BlackLine had already been tested and utilized by a number of users.”

Liberty’s first phase of the BlackLine implementation required only six weeks for one of the key operational entities. “When we said we were going to implement in six weeks, a lot of people said that such an aggressive timeline may not be achievable,” says Bird. “But we met our six-week deadline, which was an incredible accomplishment for our finance organization. It’s really a testament to how easy BlackLine is to implement and understand.”

Ms. Bird credits their BlackLine implementation consultant for helping Liberty Group implement on schedule. “Our implementation consultant was really, really fantastic. He guided us through the entire process, and we did a lot of online learning and training to upskill as quickly as possible. Our second implementation only took three weeks, which was quite a big achievement for us considering the size and magnitude of the organization.”