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.
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Centage
Score 9.5 out of 10
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Centage (Planning Maestro) offers a way to plan, budget, forecast and report financial performance by enabling finance teams
to see into the future, and test the impact of different scenarios, in order to make faster decisions with confidence. The software streamlines the entire planning process, delivering sophisticated financial intelligence to empowers users to make faster, more informed decisions, so they can react quickly to market changes, take intelligent risks and
capitalize on new…
BlackLine is well-suited for us when it comes to the bank reconciliations, as our systems feed right into BlackLine, and the various match sets reconcile the data effortlessly. BlackLine would work to its fullest extent if all departments utilized it, so you can take advantage of all the various products that are available.
Centage is suited for all types of business. This is what makes this tool so great. It requires some expertise in setting it up and depending on how complex the business is, it may take longer than expected. It's a complex system and if you are not involved in the implementtion it might be hard to learn what is does.
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.
Planning personnel with all the related benefit expenses is very accurate and we are able to forecast increases as well.
Storing separate versions of the budget allows us to finalize for the year and have access to the data while we update the default plan with any changes.
I ilke the way you can add intelligence see the detail of calculations below th eline item.
I like writing Planning Maestro reports to see drill downs of any item and tie them to our ERP Budget
On the home page I can see Team Assignments usually first time not My assignments.
JV posting is slow.
Many error emails about failed JV with the same context.
We receive emails about task certification. Can we receive the list of reconciliations monthly?
Posted/prepared JVs cannot be deleted from the to-do list (there is only one extraordinary case, where we had a BL issue and the JV was booked but without a Document ID).
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.
Since implementing Blackline, our support team has had quite a bit of turnover, and as such, it has taken longer than normal to get meaningful resolutions to our issues. The people we have worked with have all been great and responsive. However, the turnover has definitely had an impact on our experience.
The team makes sure that you get what you need out of the software. They will do whatever is in their power to make sure you're happy and are getting back your investment (time and money).
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
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.
I used to use an older consolidating product call FRX or something like that, very manual where accounts were adding line the reporting lines one by one.... Centage is far superior, the ability to create custom Dimension hierarchies as improved our reporting 100 fold
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.
Talent retention by creating roles with value-add work and reducing the mundane.
Promotion opportunities for those that have embraced BlackLine and have taken on more complex and more rewarding work as a result of the automation achieved.
Time savings which allowed teams to take on new projects without increasing headcount and without employee burnout.
We were a very small company growing by acquisition so it worked well during these phases of our company growth.
The return for our cost was tremendous especially in comparison to peers in the market.
Analytics Maestro allowed us to grow without adding headcount by building efficient reports that can easily be mass-produced for all branches within our organization.
