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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Chargebee
Score 8.4 out of 10
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ChargeBee is an all in one subscription billing solution designed to handle all the complexity of recurring billing. The product integrates with a range of other SaaS applications including SalesForce, accounting, and order fulfillment systems. Some key features include: Managed Subscription Billing, Flexible Billing Support and Automated Notifications.
$599
per month for up to USD 100K of billing per month; 0.75% on billing thereafter
Pricing
BlackLine
Chargebee
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Scale
$599
per month for up to USD 100K of billing per month; 0.75% on billing thereafter
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.
In a B2B set up - Post achieving some scale and having outgrown Google Sheets/ Excels. Won't add much value if you are dealing with fewer than 400-500 invoices a year.
We haven't explored their B2C subscription management side - but that is one of the key strengths of the platform.
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.
It wasn't allowing us to add a one time purchase without making it an ongoing subscription with only one payment. They may have fixed it very recently but that was a big pain from a reporting perspective (it was including one time purchasers as subscribers)
Email automation is not very robust. Difficult to customize triggers by subscription, you have to send the same message to all subscribers for a specific action
Wish it had a way to write off and cancel the subscription of customers who haven't updated their cc info. That can be a long painful and very manual process. And if that feature is available somewhere they don't do a good job of making that clear.
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.
It's very easy to use once you know what you're doing. I found it very straight forward once I got the hang of things and was able to create plans easily for my business. I was also able to just charge my clients right away easily. Refunding was also easy when needed.
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.
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
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.
The major reason to go with chargebee is its costing as compared to its competitors it is much useful and value for money.Also it has many features that is very practical and efficient to use it.I recommend to the people who involves low costing as well as futuristic features.
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.
