BlackLine home page Financial Close Management
Close faster with complete and accurate results.
Empower Accounting to manage and control the end-to-end financial close process by automating accounting workflows, providing a centralized and secure workspace to perform period-end accounting activities, and streamlining financial reporting.
Account Reconciliations
Standardize, control, and streamline reconciliations.
Increase accuracy and efficiency across your account reconciliation process and produce timely and accurate financial statements. Drive accuracy in the financial close by providing a streamlined method to substantiate your balance sheet.
Task Management
Drive visibility, accountability, and control across every accounting checklist.
Standardize, accelerate, and centrally manage accounting processes – from month-end close tasks to PBC checklists – with hierarchical task lists, role-based workflows, and real-time dashboards.
Transaction Matching
Match, analyze, and reconcile millions of transactions in minutes.
Streamline and automate detail-heavy reconciliations, such as bank reconciliations, credit card matching, intercompany reconciliations, and invoice-to-PO matching all in one centralized workspace.
Journal Entry
Centralize, manage, and automate journal entries.
Create, review, and approve journals, then electronically certify, post them to and store them with all supporting documentation. Automatically create, populate, and post journals to your ERP based on your rules.
Financial Reporting Analytics
Control, validate, and streamline financial statement analyses.
Perform pre-consolidation, group-level analysis in real-time with efficient, end-to-end transparency and traceability. Reduce risk and save time by automating workflows to provide more timely insights.
Variance Analysis
Continuously monitor for risk with automated fluctuation analysis.
Calculate and identify account balance and activity fluctuations automatically to continuously monitor for risk, ensure the effective and timely execution of critical management review controls, and support agile decision-making.
Smart Close for SAP
Simplify, standardize, and automate your financial close in SAP.
Streamline and automate activities in SAP with task scheduling and execution, activity monitoring, and outcome verification.
Accounts Receivable Automation
Maximize working capital and release cash from your balance sheet.
Maximize working capital with the only unified platform for collecting cash, providing credit, and understanding cash flow. Transform your accounts receivable processes with intelligent AR automation that delivers value across your business.
Cash Application
Apply customer payments to invoices automatically.
Transform your order-to-cash cycle and speed up your cash application process by instantly matching and accurately applying customer payments to customer invoices in your ERP.
Credit & Risk Management
Create and operate risk polices with dynamic insights.
Understand customer data and performance behaviors to minimize the risk of bad debt and the impact of late payments. Monitor changes in real time to identify and analyze customer risk signals.
Collections Management
Release cash from customers and reduce DSO.
Improve the prioritization of customer calls, reduce days sales outstanding, and watch productivity rise with more dynamic, accurate, and smarter collection management processes.
Disputes & Deductions
Resolve customer disputes promptly to collect debt.
Accelerate dispute resolution with automated workflows and maintain customer relationships with operational reporting. Unlock full control and visibility of disputes and provide better insight into how they impact KPIs, such as DSO and aged debt provisions.
Team & Task Management
Maximize your time with data-driven prioritization.
Make the most of your team’s time by automating accounts receivables tasks and using data to drive priority, action, and results. Monitor and analyze user performance, ensuring key actions quickly.
AR Intelligence
Turn payment data into actionable, real-time intelligence.
Automatically process and analyze critical information such as sales and payment performance data, customer payment trends, and DSO to better manage risk and develop strategies to improve operational performance.
Invoicing & Compliance
Automate invoice processing to reduce manual invoicing costs, maintain compliance with e-invoicing regulations, and increase efficiency across your invoice-to-pay process.
Intercompany Financial Management
Unlock growth capacity with tax-effective intercompany operations.
Centralize, streamline, and automate end-to-end intercompany operations with global billing, payment, and automated reconciliation capabilities that provide speed and accuracy. Ignite staff efficiency and advance your business to more profitable growth.
Intercompany Non-Trade
Automate, optimize, and manage intercompany non-trade transactions.
Ensure consistent regulatory and tax compliance by automating non-trade transactions and invoices while enforcing trading relationships and policies, as well as required taxes and transfer pricing.
Intercompany Balance & Resolve
Centralize, streamline, and automate intercompany reconciliations and dispute management.
Seamlessly integrate with all intercompany systems and data sources. Automatically identify intercompany exceptions and underlying transactions causing out-of-balances with rules-based solutions to resolve discrepancies quickly.
Intercompany Net & Settle
Streamline and automate intercompany transaction netting and settlement to ensure cash precision.
Enable greater collaboration between Accounting and Treasury with real-time visibility into open transactions. Integrate with treasury systems to facilitate and streamline netting, settlement, and clearing to optimize working capital.
BlackLine for Midsize Organizations
Get set up quickly for a streamlined and automated close.
The path from traditional to modern accounting is different for every organization. BlackLine’s Modern Accounting Playbook delivers a proven-practices approach to help you identify and prioritize your organization’s critical accounting gaps and map out an achievable path to success.
BlackLine for Large Enterprises
Save time and cost, decrease risk, and elevate the organization.
BlackLine’s foundation for modern accounting creates a streamlined and automated close. We’re dedicated to delivering the most value in the shortest amount of time, equipping you to not only control close chaos, but also foster F&A excellence.
BlackLine for Banking & Financial Services
Invest in your future by unifying and automating accounting work.
To sustain timely performance of daily activities, banking and financial services organizations are turning to modern accounting and finance practices. It’s no longer a matter of whether or not to digitally transform. It’s a matter of when and how.
BlackLine for Consumer Products & Services
Adapt to changing consumer preferences with agile accounting.
To mitigate financial statement risk and increase operational effectiveness, consumer goods organizations are turning to modern accounting and leading best practices. Simply sticking with ‘the way it’s always been done’ is a thing of the past.
BlackLine for Energy & Raw Materials
Energize your accounting team by creating capacity with automation.
While you are innovating to produce safe, reliable, and sustainable products and services, our solutions help accounting teams save time, reduce risk, and create capacity to support your organization's strategic objectives.
BlackLine for Healthcare & Life Sciences
Align healthcare accounting teams to revenue-driving activities.
Working capital, cash flows, collections opportunities, and other critical metrics depend on timely and accurate processes. Ensure services revenue has been accurately recorded and related payments are reflected properly on the balance sheet.
BlackLine for Manufacturing
Unlock capacity and strengthen resilience by automating accounting.
To respond and lead amid supply chain challenges demands on accounting teams in manufacturing companies are higher than ever. Guide your business with agility by standardizing processes, automating routine work, and increasing visibility.
BlackLine for Retail
Tie out millions of transactions automatically.
Retailers are recalibrating their strategies and investing in innovative business models to drive transformation quickly, profitably, and at scale. Save time, reduce risk, and create capacity to support your organization's strategic objectives.
BlackLine for Technology, Media & Communications
Transform the way you work.
You've transformed the way we experience the world. It's time to embrace modern accounting technology to save time, reduce risk, and create capacity to focus your time on what matters most.
SAP Solutions by BlackLine
BlackLine is part of your SAP financial mission control center. Our solutions complement SAP software as part of an end-to-end offering for Finance & Accounting. BlackLine solutions address the traditional manual processes that are performed by accountants outside the ERP, often in spreadsheets.
Companies Running on Oracle Close Faster with BlackLine
Global brands and the fastest growing companies run Oracle and choose BlackLine to accelerate digital transformation. BlackLine delivers comprehensive solutions that unify accounting and finance operations across your Oracle landscape.
BlackLine is Built for NetSuite
Gain global visibility and insight into accounting processes while reducing risk, increasing productivity, and ensuring accuracy. Close the gaps left in critical finance and accounting processes with minimal IT support.
Agile Solutions for Dynamic Organizations
Adapt and innovate with a hyperconnected Accounting function and give everyone the insights and freedom to thrive by connecting your data, processes, and teams with intelligent automation solutions for accounting needs.
Environmental, Social, and Governance
ESG is an opportunity for F&A teams to have a direct impact on how their organizations interact with the communities around them and how they deliver value to their stakeholders.
Recruiting & Retaining Top Talent
Rising labor costs and shifting expectations are contributing to unprecedented change in the labor market and altering the way companies and their executives think about talent management.
Enabling an ERP Transformation
ERP transformations are business transformations. Finance and accounting expertise is not only needed to prevent ERP transformation failures, but F&A leaders are poised to help drive project plans and outcomes.
CFO & CIO Collaboration
Finance and IT leaders share a common goal of equipping their organizations with ways to work smarter to enable competitive advantage. This intersection between CFO and CIO priorities is driving more unity in terms of strategy and execution.
F&A Transformation
F&A teams have embraced their expanding roles, but unprecedented demand for their time coupled with traditional manual processes make it difficult for F&A to execute effectively. Transformation is necessary to address these challenges.
IPO Readiness
F&A leadership can have a significant impact by creating sustainable, scalable processes that can support the business before, during, and long after the IPO. This company-wide effort crosses multiple functional areas and is reinforced by critical project management and a strong technology infrastructure.
Mergers & Acquisitions
Timely, reliable data is critical for decision-making and reporting throughout the M&A lifecycle. Without accurate information, organizations risk making poor business decisions, paying too much, issuing inaccurate financial statements, and other errors.
Revenue Cycle Optimization
The revenue cycle refers to the entirety of a company’s ordering process from the time an order is placed until an invoice is paid and settled. The inability to apply payments on time and accurately can not only lock up cash, but also negatively impact future sales and the overall customer experience.
Regulatory Compliance
While the responsibility to maintain compliance stretches across the organization, F&A has a critical role in ensuring compliance with financial rules and regulations. Together with expanding roles, new expectations from stakeholders, and evolving regulatory requirements, these demands can place unsustainable strain on finance and accounting functions.
Customer Success
Customer Success Stories
In good company.
More than 4,000 companies of all sizes, across all industries, trust BlackLine to help them modernize their financial close, accounts receivable, and intercompany accounting processes.
BlackLine returns $2.77 for every dollar spent
BlackLine Community
Join an exclusive community of peers, partners, and BlackLine experts.
BlackLine users around the world gain access to a digital hub of insight, information, and engagement that enables the exchange of ideas and leading practices for peak F&A performance.
Learn, collaborate, and get the help you need.
Services
Guided, connected, and committed to your success.
BlackLine Services combine leading practices and expert guidance with best-in-class technology to help your F&A organization seamlessly implement sound processes and solutions, identify new opportunities for accounting optimization, and expand into areas you never imagined you would have the time to tackle.
Professional Services
Build a foundation for world-class accounting.
Whether planning your first implementation or expanding your BlackLine platform, leverage expert guidance to help you build and execute your vision, drive unified, automated, and continuous accounting processes, and enable Finance and Accounting to deliver strategic business value.
Training & Education
Accelerate adoption and drive productivity and performance.
One of the critical success drivers for any software technology is effective user training and adoption. Whether you are deploying for the first time or creating a sustainable education program for maximum value creation, explore how you can take the next steps to upskill your users.
Customer Success
Your success is our success.
From onboarding to financial operations excellence, our customer success management team helps you unlock measurable value. Through workshops, webinars, digital success options, tips and tricks, and more, you will develop leading-practice processes and strategies to propel your organization forward.
Transformation Services
Go beyond with end-to-end transformation.
Powerful technology is only part of the story. Successful transformation requires expert guidance from a trusted partner. Explore offerings that unlock new transformation opportunities and make transformation a reality.
Global Support
World-class support so you can focus on what matters most.
BlackLine provides global product support across geographies, languages, and time zones, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We are here for you with industry-leading support whenever and wherever you need it.
Events
Connect with peers across Finance & Accounting.
Whether new to BlackLine or a longtime customer, we curate events to guide you along every step of your modern accounting journey.
BeyondTheBlack APAC 2023
Upcoming Webinars
Hear from F&A thought leaders and customers like you.
Explore our schedule of upcoming webinars to find inspiration, including industry experts, strategic alliance partners, and boundary-pushing customers. And, earn CPE credits while you're at it.
On-Demand Webinars
Catch up on the latest finance transformation guidance.
Check out our most recent webinars dedicated to modern accounting. If you recently attended webinar you loved, find it here and share the link with your colleagues.
White Papers
Dive into digital finance transformation.
Explore the future of accounting over a cup of coffee with our curated collection of white papers and ebooks written to help you consider how you will transform your people, process, and technology.
12 Keys to Financial Operations Excellence
Blog
Stay on top of the latest accounting trends.
BlackLine Magazine provides daily updates on everything from companies that have transformed F&A to new regulations that are coming to disrupt your day, week, and month. Check back often for the latest commentary and guidance.
Explore the latest in F&A innovations.
Accounting Glossary
Brush up on key accounting terms.
Whether you're new to F&A or an experienced professional, sometimes you need a refresher on common finance and accounting terms and their definitions. BlackLine's glossary provides descriptions for industry words and phrases, answers to frequently asked questions, and links to additional resources.
Your guide to key F&A terms and definitions.
Developer Portal
Integrate your accounting operations with open APIs.
Our API-first development strategy gives you the keys to integrate your finance tech stack - from one ERP to one hundred - and create seamless data flows in and out of BlackLine.
Explore our APIs to maximum integration.
About BlackLine
Since our founding in 2001, BlackLine has become a leading provider of cloud software that automates and controls critical accounting processes.
Companies come to BlackLine because their traditional manual accounting processes are not sustainable. We help them move to modern accounting by unifying their data and processes, automating repetitive work, and driving accountability through visibility.
Leadership
BlackLine's leadership team is built on experience and expertise. Every executive is committed to ensuring transformational success for every customer.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
At BlackLine, we live by these tenets and always put people first. We are committed to fostering an environment where differences are valued and practices are equitable.
Environmental, Social & Governance
BlackLine is committed to doing our part to create a more sustainable and equitable world, from setting high environmental standards in all BlackLine workplaces to supporting employee health and wellbeing, building strong relationships with suppliers from underrepresented communities, protecting customers’ data security and privacy and giving back to the community.
In the News
Explore original-content media coverage, commentary and analysis of BlackLine at top-tier business, trade, local and vertical media outlets, as well as contributed articles written by BlackLine experts and placed with leading media organizations.
Press Releases
Stay up to date on the latest corporate and high-level product developments at BlackLine. Here you will find a one-stop resource listing recent and historical news items, including announcement of new clients/partners, awards, new offices/facilities, personnel appointments/ changes, major software enhancements, executive speeches and upcoming events.
Investors
BlackLine is a high-growth, SaaS business that is transforming and modernizing the way finance and accounting departments operate. Our cloud software automates critical finance and accounting processes. We empower companies of all sizes across all industries to improve the integrity of their financial reporting, achieve efficiencies and enhance real-time visibility into their operations.
Awards & Recognition
In addition to accolades for the quality, performance and benefits of our software, BlackLine has been the recipient of many industry awards recognizing the fast growth of the company, outstanding achievements of members of the management team and exceptional customer service.
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Consulting Alliances
Delivering Succesful Digital Transformations
Global and regional advisory and consulting firms bring deep finance domain expertise, process transformation leadership, and shared passion for customer value creation to our joint customers. Our consulting partners help guide large enterprise and midsize organizations undergoing digital transformation by maximizing and accelerating value from BlackLine’s solutions.
Solution Provider Partners
Guiding Customers to Long-Term Success
BlackLine’s Solution Providers are experienced business software resellers who know and understand the finance and accounting function and the associated challenges that organizations face. They ensure our customers’ success with BlackLine from the initial solution validation process through deployments and long-term customer care and long-term success.
Software & Cloud Partners
Integrate Your Finance Tech Stack
BlackLine and our ecosystem of software and cloud partners work together to transform our joint customers’ finance and accounting processes. Together, we provide innovative solutions that help F&A teams achieve shorter close cycles and better controls, enabling them to drive better decision-making across the company.
Business Process Outsourcers
Driving Automation with Your Outsourcing Provider
BlackLine partners with top global Business Process Outsourcers and equips them with solutions to better serve their clients and achieve market-leading automation, efficiencies, and risk control. By outsourcing, businesses can achieve stronger compliance, gain a deeper level of industry knowledge, and grow without unnecessary costs.
Specialty Food Ingredients Provider Serves Up Automated Reconciliations
Tate & Lyle has spent more than 150 years fulfilling its mission of “making food extraordinary.” Originally founded in the UK in 1859, when Henry Tate established his sugarcane refining business, Tate & Lyle was formed in 1921 following the merger of Henry Tate’s business with the refining business of Abram Lyle & Sons. The former competitors were soon producing about half of the sugar consumed in the UK. Today, London-based Tate & Lyle no longer owns any sugar businesses, having transformed itself into a global provider of specialty food ingredients and solutions. It has more than 30 global manufacturing, processing, and distribution facilities worldwide that serve two main business units—specialty food ingredients and bulk ingredients—that count many of the world’s major food, beverage, and industrial companies as their customers.
THE CHALLENGE
The establishment of a global shared services center in Łódź, Poland, was a key part of Tate & Lyle’s consolidation efforts. From this central office, roughly 200 people in the finance department manage and reconcile balance sheets for thousands of general ledger accounts that cover transactions in the Americas as well as locations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. Prior to the Łódź office assuming responsibility for central finance operations, account reconciliations were regional; each office developed, maintained, and managed its own manual processes for reconciling accounts under its purview, including those for localized legal entities.
With the establishment of a central finance function, disparate account reconciliation processes would no longer be supported. The shared services and finance teams wanted to improve central oversight and efficiencies, increase visibility and tracking capabilities, and devote less time and resources to administrative tasks.
“Previously, our reconciliation processes were three-level and paper-based,” says Barbara Blaszczyk, head of finance operations at Tate & Lyle. “Manual reconciliations were recorded on spreadsheets, with paper signatures and different storage locations depending on the location of the account and team responsible. We wanted to have more control over the processes, and from an operational perspective, make cumbersome processes easier to manage.”
Increasing control over the reconciliation process would manifest itself in a number of different ways. It would result in more certainty over the precise number of fully reconciled accounts, improved documentation of follow-up action items, better transparency as a result of more consistent reconciliation processes, and less effort required to investigate reconciliation discrepancies.
According to Stephen Byers, group vice president and CIO at Tate & Lyle, the creation of the shared services group in parallel with the SAP systems consolidation project was the main driver for Tate & Lyle to make a business case for a solution to automate the account reconciliation process. “Centralizing financial activities into Łódź and establishing global common methods allowed us to streamline processes further with the use of automated reconciliations,” he says.
WHY BLACKLINE
The search for an automated account reconciliation tool gained steam about one year after the shared services center in Łódź assumed responsibilities for the central finance function. According to Blaszczyk, the main requirements for an automation solution were that it must offer full integration with SAP and non-SAP accounting systems, reconciliation by category for grouped accounts, standardized templates, electronic approval workflows, the ability to handle multiple currency transactions, basic reporting, and an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
After an exhaustive vendor evaluation and request for proposal (RFP) process that included live demos from multiple vendors, Tate & Lyle decided to purchase the Account Reconciliations and Task Management applications from SAP partner BlackLine and signed a contract late in 2013. “The solution was assessed as the most reliable in all the areas that we evaluated,” Blaszczyk says.
To optimize the use of the applications, Tate & Lyle performed the BlackLine implementation in parallel with a significant process simplification, knowing that automating account reconciliation would be far more effective with best-practice definitions in place.
According to Blaszczyk, the BlackLine project team’s first task was to create a responsibility matrix that listed account preparers and approvers for each account. The team also created a common chart of accounts where possible and categorized account modifications based on an account’s purpose. In addition, the team reviewed and updated accepted variances. All this was done in accordance with the Account Reconciliations product, which includes account templates, approval hierarchies, and auto-certification for static accounts.
THE RESULTS
Reduced time spent on administrative tasks. Starting with the first month-end close after going live with Account Reconciliations, the finance team noticed a significant decrease in the number of administrative tasks formerly devoted to reconciliations. Hunting for documentation or signatures in the form of emails, phone calls, or printouts, and thumbing through files all but disappeared.
Accelerated the account reconciliation process. “With a fully electronic approval and sign-off process, we now have the ability to easily review and approve reconciliations from different geographic locations,” Blaszczyk says.
For auditors, electronic storage and archiving means accounts are at their fingertips whether the account originates from the US, Europe, or the Middle East. And with auto-certification, Tate & Lyle can now auto-certify hundreds of accounts for non-critical reconciliations and for those with routine activity or an unchanging balance.
Increased efficiency with greater visibility. Using BlackLine’s out-of-the-box reports, Tate & Lyle is now analyzing the status of partial or incomplete reconciliations to determine the cause and ultimately discover where other efficiency gains can be found. “Efficiency has improved tremendously,” says Blaszczyk. “As a result of the reconciliation process becoming so much more efficient, the quality, completeness, and trust in the accuracy of each reconciliation has gone up significantly
Increased completeness and accuracy. Better accuracy is also a reflection of the Task Management application, which facilitates the month-end close process by tracking tasks associated with monthly close consolidation reviews. Task Management automates regularly occurring account activities and automates and stores activities that are attached to regularly scheduled audits.
Standardized and streamlined workflows. In addition, the application offers the option to standardize month-end close timetables, which Tate & Lyle is using to better meet deadlines; accounts are flagged, and users are notified when a deadline is approaching. Task Management replaces the use of spreadsheets for the recording and tracking of month-end close tasks. Without automated account reconciliation processes, if a preparer forgot to record a task or entered it in the wrong location, it created additional work at month-end to track down the missing documentation.
In the BlackLine application, an account will not be forwarded to the next preparer if a task is incomplete or missing the appropriate attachments or documentation. “At the end of any business day, we can see where we are with the month-end close, which tasks are completed, which are outstanding, and the overall progress of the close,” Blaszczyk says. “This helps open a line of communication between teams to identify whether there are any common challenges or issues with the month-end close that need to be addressed.”
Increased focus on value-adding tasks. Not having to chase down documentation or complete other mostly administrative tasks doesn’t mean the finance team is looking for things to do. Rather, the team is now actively pursuing more strategic tasks it never had time for before.
“As we move from manual reconciliations and gain better monitoring of month-end close tasks, we have far more time to spend on value-added activities such as analyzing data and preparing additional reports,” says Blaszczyk. “But what gives our team members the most satisfaction is the knowledge that they are now more invested in the process. They have started to enjoy preparing reconciliations and tasks—not only the technical side of it but also the outcome of the process and the understanding of the business background behind the accounting transactions.”