Once you go BlackLine you never go back
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Our organization uses Account Reconciliations, Task Management, & Transaction Matching. BlackLine has helped us bring a lot of organization, and formality to how our team goes about our reconciliation and month-end processes. Just having reconciliations and tasks in one place, in consistent formats has been amazing. Utilization of reconciliation templates and other rules within BlackLine has allowed us to automate several reconciliations, giving the team back time that can be used for other value added tasks.
Pros
- Segregation of duties - allows for a formal way to ensure that there is a separate preparer/approver for a given task or reconciliation.
- Provides visibility - having account reconciliation data in one place has automated processes that were once very manual, and involved multiple team members aggregating data.
- Streamlines communication and status of close - having all tasks in one place, in the same format gives us the visibility needed to manage our close process, and know the status of items that are still pending and open for action. This was previously a game of telephone between staff, managers, and leaders, and now has been automated via tasks.
- Automation/Optimization - BlackLine provides a lot of opportunity to automate certain reconciliations based on thresholds, rules, and templates. This allows the team to use that time for researching actual issues, and keeping our balance sheet reconciliations clean.
Cons
- One thing that would have been very helpful while learning to use BlackLine, was if there was some sort of guided assistance running while the team was using the application. This guided assistance could make suggestions like whether there is a better reconciliation template to use, or maybe identify areas that aren't being used correctly.
- If we could view documents and attachments within the application, instead of having to download.
- If we could access all features for various roles without having to switch between the roles.
Return on Investment
- Improved visibility into reconciliations & tasks.
- Ability to centralize certain functions across the team into one role, as opposed to having multiple team members perform the same function for their entities.
- While not a negative impact, it's important to note that getting the best use of BlackLine is a time commitment. The time, resources, and energy you put into it will determine how successful you are at utilizing BlackLine to transform how your team gets the job done. This optimization journey is a continuous evolution and will not be an overnight transformation.
Other Software Used
Visual Lease, Applied Epic
