How to optimize your financial close with BlackLine?

Financial close activities are increasingly time-consuming. They have a direct impact on the time it takes to produce financial reports. This is often due to numerous manual tasks, the lack of visibility into the status of close tasks, and the lack of access to real-time data.

Different people are often involved in the financial close, without centralized or standardized management across geographical areas or divisions of their company. This can lead to a lack of visibility into bottlenecks or dependencies between different tasks. This can significantly impact your close process.

Lack of automation is often a cause of wasted time. Indeed, close tasks can be delayed due to manual processes related to repetitive, non-value-added activities, or if a key person is on leave or absent from the office.

Many financial organizations struggle to gain real-time visibility into their close process. They are never safe from unpleasant surprises at the very end of the month.

For all these non-exhaustive reasons that impact the reliability of your financial close, BlackLine is a Cloud solution that allows you to automate and control financial closes and accounting processes. This is achieved while addressing the challenges of accounting modernization, thanks to the modules offered:

• Account Reconciliation: a module for automating and standardizing the account reconciliation process. It allows for framing justifications and setting up validation workflows. It includes reconciliation procedures and templates, while ensuring compliance with group and local directives. BlackLine enables the centralization of supporting documents and the definition of approval workflows with integrated segregation of duties to improve internal control processes. Once accounts are certified, they are locked to eliminate any risk of unauthorized modifications. It is also possible to automate a certain number of rules to automatically certify accounts according to defined management cases, thus freeing up accountants’ time so they can focus on qualitative activities.

• Task Management: an automated close calendar where various tasks can be organized, assigned, and tracked. It is possible to automatically schedule all recurring financial close tasks, based on the dates planned by the group. The task dependencies feature allows for the creation of hierarchical relationships between sub-tasks and ensures the correct sequence is followed.

• Journal Entry: this module is used for the accounting and validation of period-end entries. It can be applied using 2 distinct approaches, depending on expressed needs: approval of entries before or after posting. Whichever approach is chosen, the implementation of workflows guarantees the certification of entries. It also allows for the integration of corresponding supporting documents. Note that it is possible to import entries in bulk via Excel files to save time. Thus, these features automate recurring entries.

• Transaction Matching: a module for automatically reconciling millions of transactions in minutes, at a very fine level of granularity and from multiple data sources. This module can be applied for bank reconciliations, credit card matching, and invoice-to-PO matching. Automation of reconciliation frees up teams’ time to focus on exception management and analysis tasks.

• Intercompany Hub: this module dedicated to reciprocal operations provides the ability to manage intercompany flows, where all transactions are initiated, approved, validated, and recorded. Once transactions are recorded, it is possible to create invoices, then automatically generate and post entries, as well as generate bilateral settlements.

• Variance Analysis: automation of analysis flows to track variations in accounts and budgets/forecasts against actuals for balance sheet and income statement accounts. It once again includes workflow functionalities, documentation centralization, and automation.

• Compliance: with great configuration flexibility while being standardized and consistent, BlackLine Compliance ensures consistency between controls and compliance attestations. Note that it can be integrated with your control systems, risk control matrices, or business procedures. All your documents, projects, and stakeholders related to compliance are centralized there. This allows you to manage SOX controls, operational and IT audits, self-assessments, etc.

• Reporting – data visualization: BlackLine has a data visualization module that is transversal to all modules. It offers numerous standard reports that can be quickly adapted. This can be very useful, especially for profiles such as CFOs or Shared Service Center Managers, who wish to obtain the status of various close activities in real time.

It is important to emphasize that all these modules integrate with each other. The goal is to gain efficiency and improve your close process. For example, it is possible to trigger an adjustment entry from the Account Reconciliation module if a correction is identified as necessary during the justification of an account balance. Furthermore, you can include the justifications to be performed and the entries to be posted in the Task Management module. Or, you can use reciprocal transactions as justification in the account reconciliation module and generate intercompany entries from the Journal Entry module.

BlackLine is designed to communicate with any ERP. Native functionalities are provided to facilitate interfacing with SAP or Oracle. Taking SAP as an example, with which BlackLine is a partner, interfaces are built using the easily configurable SAP Connector.

This solution addresses the challenges of modernizing and ensuring the reliability of your financial close. Thanks to the multiple features offered, and its ability to provide quick wins such as:

• Documentation and centralization of all your close activities in a single Cloud solution
• Remote collaboration of all stakeholders
• Real-time visibility into the progress of all activities, allowing for the identification of bottlenecks
• Automate close activities to achieve time savings, transparency, and efficiency
• Ensure continuity and control by incorporating group procedures and directives, while respecting segregation of duties

If you would like to know more about our BlackLine-related services, you can contact us at: jsaccona@meltone.com