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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Domo
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Domo is a full self-service business intelligence software that combines several data analysis and reporting tools into one platform. It helps users connect to multiple data sources, create robust visual reports, manage their data, send messages in real-time, manage projects, and develop new apps.
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Qlik Cloud Analytics (Qlik Sense)
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Qlik Sense® is a self-service BI platform for data discovery and visualization. It supports a full range of analytics use cases—data governance, pixel-perfect reporting, and collaboration. Its Associative Engine indexes and connects relationships between data points for creating actionable insights.
Accounting Everywhere: Cheap product with almost all the Blackline essential functionalities. Oracle ARCS: More preferable for users already has ORACLE as ERP.
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.
I believe that companies that record large amounts of data about their product, service employers KPIs, etc, can make the best out of Domo for reporting and data analysis, but if a company handles little data and is not recording this consistently, it will not be of much use.
Qlik Sense is a program whose purpose is to greatly improve all your operations and use of all data in an organic way. The mission will always be to increase the economic and commercial processes of the company in a short time. I recommended it for its high technology, which was Created for this area, the results are successful. We have noticed how it has increased relationships with our clients thanks to the credibility and security that we provide.
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.
Exceptional Transform area of the platform - any/all raw data can be manipulated and combined to create datasources that are very useful for our departments.
Visualization layer is clean and is very business presentable. Its simple but includes depth. Visuals can be created/used by all roles throughout our firm, its not limited to analysts.
Ability to communicate and talk about insights in the data - the communication tool is exceptional. I can @ mention specific users to bring attention to a discovery. I can start a private chat. I can annotate and communicate what I am seeing. I love it.
Mobile experience is excellent. When I am on the road i can actively monitor and engage with my team due to my Domo dashboard on my mobile device. Its amazing to run the business and not worry while away from the office.
Allow us to have multiple screens open simultaneously without timing out.
When reviewing an individual Match ID#, make it so we can expand text boxes to see the entire text. Currently, we have some comments that are extremely long, and we are unable to read them in their entirety without copying and pasting them into Word.
Copying Reports - In Excel or Google Sheets, I like to make copies of similar reports and modify them as necessary for users. In Domo, makes copies of reports (called cards) but all copies are connected. So if you adjust the copy, it changes the original. This means a user has to recreate the report from scratch and then adjust it.
Unforgiving SQL - Domo does allow users to write their own SQL codes, which is great. However, Domo's SQL code is pickier than the other SQL database I've used (Metabase).
Text Alerts - Domo's alerts aren't always the smartest. Some of my dashboards are about the sales teams monthly performance and I get notified when there is a change of more than 20%. I always get notified at the start of the month that reports have changed from 'x' number to zero. This is expected because it's a monthly report and I hate getting texts about it. The only reason I don't term them off so I can be aware if something breaks in the middle of the month.
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.
Domo is a great up-and-coming product. There are many fantastic features that are extremely compelling to our end users, which makes Domo a great fit for our organization. As with many BI tools, there are items on the wish list that could make implementation, administration and usage easier, but I believe these will be addressed over time as the product matures and evolves. The overall concept and approach of this solution has definitely raised the bar in this area of expertise and I would like to see things advance in giving the enterprise tools that will make decision making easier and more robust in the future.
Qlik Sense is a constantly improving it's software and working with its' users to make it better. They are great at keeping their users informed of progress and care about delivering a quality product
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.
The built-in user support and intuitive design of Domo makes it simple to learn and use. I find I can spend hours drilling deep, or else quickly gain an overview in just a few minutes. This is a great advantage since the flexibility fits well with the demands of my role. I enjoy using Domo since I know it will give me comparative data across almost every variable I might want to explore - I look forward to it!
Qlik Sense has a better and easy to learn user interface compared with other analytics tool which always help us to create regular and adhoc reports within the stipulated time frame and can be easily refreshed at a scheduled time and sent to multiple stakeholders for timely update regarding the Key metrics indicator.
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.
Pretty responsive. It took a while to get a response in selecting data points for our particular cards. Might have taken about a month? I am not sure if this was something on our end or Domo's end. But haven't had any other issues yet that required additional support from Domo.
Qlik is great for companies with lots of business domains and departments because it scales well, especially if data that is reported is saved in SQL and similar structures. Its ease of use and good UI enables business units to create and manage their own reports. That removes a great burden of creating and managing/modifying these pages from the IT team. Overall, it's a win-win for both IT and business units.
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
It is a true web-based application so implementation is much easier and smoother compared to other non-web based BI solutions. Also, they offered consulting services during the implementation process, which was helpful. Also, they provided lots of on-demand training courses and videos, which I liked.
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.
At the end of the day, end-user adoption and taking the burden of IT to build reports was my goal. Demoing and testing many BI tools, DOMO is the one that allowed both to happen.
The customization of the platform opens up plenty of other options depending on the use cases. The API layer is incredibly rich and makes integration of Qlik based visualization into web pages a simple and effective pattern. It's been very easy to use with a great community made up of professionals. Qlik Sense has introduces artificial Intelligence into my data visualization and reporting activity.
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.
I mentioned a "previously un-analyzable" dataset that we were able to visualize in Domo - the result was business re-alignment for increased productivity, cost savings and ROI.
It's tough to quantify the ability to provide insights that have been desired for years but not possible - we continue to amaze our executives and product managers with the analysis we can provide.
