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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D&B Finance Analytics
Score 8.6 out of 10
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D&B Finance Analytics is a global credit-to-cash solution that provides Dun & Bradstreet data, analytics, and technology to help improve cash flow, increase operational efficiency, and mitigate risk. This AI-driven solution comprises two platforms – D&B Credit Intelligence and D&B Receivables Intelligence powered by GETPAID – that together help finance teams transform their operations and reduce cost through insight, automation, and enhanced customer experience.
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.
It's good for our vendor and customer due diligence, but mediocre with alerts. The risk scoring and paydex trade information is always helpful, but not always applicable for term debt lenders. But the monitoring of customers has helped over the years to determine any judgments, suits, or bankruptcies that have come up.
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.
Finding Companies through Search or Advanced Search. It's got an easy search bar. And then for example, we have companies all over the world that come to us. And so we can just choose the country, for example, and then write the name in there and it'll bring up a lot of different companies that maybe are exactly that name or close to that name. And when we see what we believe to be the actual company, we can click on it and then know whether they are credit worthy.
Great UX on the website - fast and easy to use. The speed with which it operates is really terrific and very important for us because we usually have to make that decision right away.
Using something as objective as a numerical score simplifies decisions about offering credit. We have to make a decision usually on whether to offer credit to an advertiser quickly. So what's wonderful about the process is that we don't have to be searching around on Google or any kind of review site and then try to discern whether they're credit worthy. We simply open up the D&B Finance Analytics tool.
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).
I would like to see contact information, such as Accounting contact names and email addresses. Not sure how hard that would be to provide but it would be extremely helpful.
I'm sure there are more things I might suggest, but we don't use enough of the options offered right now in our package.
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.
D&B Finance Analytics reports have just about everything. You can see a full company profile including legal forms, history records, employee count, years in business, paydex scores, delinquency scores, viability ratings, state of incorporations, naics codes, CEO or business owner names, etc. There is a lot that pulls up in this report
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.
Very easy to access, and the reports are generally intuitive and clearly understandable. Some minor issues with entering data, nothing that would keep me from using this software, though. The databases it draws from are robust, and I can generally find the information I need, or get pointed to that information as a result of studying the report.
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.
I rate the performance very good. The report loads quickly and downloads in a reasonable time frame given the extensive complexity of the report. I've never had an issue
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.
Isaac has been very helpful in providing support. I have only inquired once regarding our remaining reports' availability, and he was very helpful in finding the appropriate solution, which in this case was to add additional reports to the duration of our contract at a prorated rate.
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.
The online training was worth it. We did an online training with our team and an account rep from D&B. They walked us through the entire interface and answered all of our questions.
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 have only used D&B Finance Analytics in my career; however, there are alternatives that we use when the data is not available. We typically request trade references and a bank reference, which are usually very valuable in addition to the D&B report. When all three options provide valuable data, we generally make the best decisions on credit.
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.
