Since 1953, Sound Community Bank has grown to serve more than 25,000 consumer and small business customers in the Puget Sound region of northwestern Washington. But as the bank grew to $1.1 billion in assets, its finance and accounting team faced a rising workload of manual processes in spreadsheets.

The bank, a subsidiary of the publicly traded Sound Financial Bancorp, implemented BlackLine in 2019 and was able to streamline their financial close. The customer gained visibility, standardization, and control in their processes. However, the platform was underutilized and often leveraged as a simple repository for complex reconciliations completed in spreadsheets, allowing the company to leverage the platform further to gain additional efficiency and accuracy in their financial close processes.

That changed in 2021 when the bank hired a new chief accounting officer, Jennifer Mallon, who immediately recognized the potential for transforming finance with BlackLine. “We knew we needed to expand the use of BlackLine to allow us to grow and perform at the high level expected of a publicly traded company, but without expanding the size of our accounting team,” Mallon says.

Mallon also envisioned automating manual work would improve job satisfaction and curtail high accounting turnover. Sound Community Bank started its transformation in early 2022 by engaging BlackLine professional services, attending a BeyondTheBlack conference, and consulting with other banks that use BlackLine—setting the stage for resounding success and a commitment to continuous optimization.

10x productivity gain. Accounting team output has increased tenfold with BlackLine automating what were tedious manual tasks. For example, time for Federal Reserve Board reconciliations was cut from four hours per day to just five to 10 minutes, saving approximately 76 hours a month. At the same time, the bank moved an accounting FTE into a financial planning and analysis expert, opening up their organization for more value-added activity.

Faster close and response time. Sound Community Bank has reduced its period-end close by several days while completing reconciliations 15 days earlier than before. In addition, finance is now supplying information to the operations team “very, very quickly,” eliminating what used to be months of delay.

Automation of ATM/ITM reconciliations. Working with BlackLine, the bank has just begun automating tricky ATM/ITM (interactive teller machine) reconciliations. Besides time savings, Sound Community Bank is gaining new visibility to address anomalous transactions and improve client satisfaction quickly.

Broad organizational impacts. Efficiencies have increased capacity for value-add finance improvements, including a switch from top-level to bottom-up budgeting and hiring a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) expert. “We never could have done that without the efficiencies we achieved with BlackLine,” Mallon says. “We’re small with fewer than 130 employees, but we can now compete with larger companies and larger accounting departments head-to-head.”