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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Kyriba
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Kyriba empowers CFOs, Treasurers and their IT counterparts to transform liquidity as a dynamic, real-time vehicle for growth and value creation. Kyriba is a secure, scalable SaaS platform that leverages artificial intelligence, automates payments workflows, and enables thousands of multinational corporations and banks to maximize growth, protect against loss from fraud and financial risk and reduce operational costs. Kyriba states that for…
BlackLine is more advanced with the SAP Connector that we are using from a timing perspective. Being a global company, they couldn't meet our volume requirements that we set forward.
The API functionality is one that was very important to our landscape, and they weren't ready …
Verified User
Professional
Chose BlackLine
BlackLine was more robust and well put together than competitors. The yearly 100M reinvestment into their product is a big selling point.
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.
Kyriba is a fully featured TMS that offers SaaS ease of maintenance and implementation. Because of the amount of customization and feature set, cost is higher, implementation time can be longer against some of the other other options in the market. That said - for those looking for a SaaS platform TMS, Kyriba offers almost everything that can be asked for and often beats competitors in pure capabilities and features. There is also a steep learning curve - so for simpler Treasury orgs, the cost likely isn't worth it.
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.
There are a few downsides as well for this product like the system processing is different with different modules which are quite strange and sometimes get pretty taunting for the users.
Also, the debt module needs improvement and should become more relevant to the overall software. This is one of the biggest cons I would say and it also needs to be fixed immediately for a better user experience.
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.
Very powerful treasury management tool, the reason it's not a 10 is implementation and support lags behind competitors. It can take a long time for issues to get resolved. But once it's set up properly, everything works well most of the time. Few if any other providers will have the same range of features.
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.
Kyriba is very easy to use and offers Elevate training for continued growth. It is extremely customizable which makes it easy to adapt the system to any organization and connect with any ERP or financial institution. There is also continued support and webinars to continue to build on it’s functionality.
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.
We have weekly calls with our support team to discuss ongoing implementation projects and other issues we find from time to time. They are very responsive to any questions we have and can escalate issues to a higher level of support if they do not have the expertise necessary to fix the problem. They are helpful in coordinating testing with banks if necessary, and provide regular statistics regarding support calls, causes of problems, and resolution.
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
We had some issues with one of the implementation people provided by Kyriba. The communication skills were lacking, with assumptions being made as to what we knew already. It was very frustrating. Once that was resolved, further module implementations have been smoother.
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.
In previous companies, the payments were processed from an AS400 based module, which required a deep technical knowledge for every action required, turning simple things like adding a bank account into a nightmare With Kyriba, most of the processes and updates just requires a couple of clicks and copy/paste updated information
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.
Kyriba saves our department time, which is the most valuable thing we have. Before Kyriba we had to log into each bank to pull data for the prior day before we could enter our current day activity. Now the banks send the data right to Kyriba! It saves us about 3 hours of work each day from our old process.
Kyriba has given us visibility into all of our bank accounts in a centralized platform. We can better monitor activity and use that information to make better business decisions.
Kyriba has given us better transparency because of dual approval. One person has to enter information and another person has to approve information, so we have tighter controls.
