The Billtrust suite of AR solutions helps make sense of customers' ever-expanding invoicing preferences, their growing use of digital payments, and AR teams' valuable time. Accelerating the order-to-cash cycle benefits both sides of the B2B transaction.
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BlackLine
Score 8.9 out of 10
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BlackLine's cloud-based financial operations management platform unifyies data and processes, automating repetitive tasks and enhancing accountability. BlackLine solutions for financial close, accounts receivable, and intercompany accounting support large enterprises and midsize companies.
For a simple invoice-based organization, especially with multiple stores, Billtrust is an appropriate fit. While lacking in design and intuitive functionality, Billtrust got the job done as far as receiving payments from customers. However, if you are in a subscription-based business or one that invoices on a frequent repetitive manner, Billtrust may not be the best solution.
BlackLine is great for centralization and standardization of Recs, great for reporting and ease of controls documentation. It is not a full fledged automated GRC platform but what it does do with Recs and GL recs is exemplary. The use of the automated Data Loads for both GL and Subledgers is fantastic.
Billtrust's customer service always replies within 24 hours, leaving the case open until it is verified to be resolved.
The customer portal our credit managers access is exceptionally well designed, allowing us to see when an invoice was delivered, and even when the end-user opened it. There are built-in reports to answer almost any question.
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.
The Reporting Module does not provide any FRA reports. Variance reporting is Limited.
FRA, To trace from GL balances imported to the Variance module can be difficult, as you need to map the GL balances to the level in the Var Module. This is a manual offline process. Would be good to have reporting that provides the link.
Matching Module - Intransit, when scheduling, you cannot pull all the unmatched transactions; only the current period.
Match Sets: if you have a chance to a live match set (e.g., filter at DS), you can't update the Match Set; you have to rebuild. It would be good to be able to amend and not rebuild.
We have a longstanding good record of invoice delivery and a high number of customers who are accustomed to the look and feel for logging to make payments
BlackLine has made our finance team more effective and accurate. Our current ERP system is unable to do any sort of financial activities currently being done with our BlackLine licenses. Prior to BlackLine everything was done manually through Excel and stored in binders. There was no option for a paperless process. We are now 100% paperless in our close process, freeing up time, space and saving money on office supplies.
BlackLine could use a little work in getting around the system. The interface is not without its issues including lots of scrolling up and down and a lack of using the entire screen. Importing of the initial setup data could be better defined and reimporting data to add additional fields could pose an issue of overwriting data in a negative way.
We never experienced an outage with BlackLine. The only time the system was unavailable was during planned outages for updates and upgrades usually Friday evening after 6pm pst until Saturday morning at 6am pst.
We deal with our customer's AR personnel to help resolve issues with our open invoices. They can help us but seem to be lacking in the overall understanding of the Billtrust software and why things may work the way they do. We have some accounts that are active that we have been unable to add to our corporate account, and as a result, these bills must be paid via check, and we are not currently receiving statements. It would be great if they had more robust customer service or maybe different criteria for creating accounts.
Our issues have been few and far between, and have usually been very niche, requiring an extensive review process on both our end and BlackLine's. BlackLine worked with us every step of the way to get them resolved, but because of their nature, they can take longer than a day/week to resolve.
Trainings are available for all topics on the BlackLine U portal. These were incredibly helpful when first starting with BlackLine to get the hang of it. Trainings are useful for any module. I have personally used this to teach myself how to use the tasks and variance modules, which are now fully utilized by my organization. The support team is also very helpful in training our team on anything additional we have needed.
You will have to meet up with your final users, approver, internal auditor and accounting policy holder. Everyone has to agree. When you have a well written process, workflow, policy, approval requirement, and control, your implementation process will be much easier
For a less tech-educated workforce, Billtrust did the job and required minimal developer resources on our end. Also, while Billtrust lacked in several arenas relative to Stripe, it was good for us since we were not a subscription-based business. For the price, Billtrust was a good solution for our invoice-to-pay business.
I have not used any of the other products, but we did evaluate them during our discovery phase. BlackLine was the "Cadillac" of the product offerings. You could get a similar product, and maybe even at a lower cost, but we wanted the best of the best, and that's what BlackLine is. We wanted a product that we could grow into, rather than a product we would outgrow over time as our organization grows. We have only touched the surface with BlackLine so far, and we've already reaped the benefits.
After implementing BlackLine our company acquired another large company with multiple operations. We were able to use the COVID shutdown to bring them on board with BlackLine with little effort in the setup and training of the users.
10 day reduction in our DSO resulting in increased cash flow
Savings in printing, ink, folding, stuffing, and postage over in-house production, and additional savings with every customer that changes from paper to electronic delivery methods
Increased payment application by batching payment types by day into one file
Enhanced knowledge base for staff through webinars, Twitterviews, conferences, classes, and contact with customer support allow our staff to utilize our tools fully
