BlackLine vs. Prophix

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.

If the budgeting is done with Excel spreadsheets, and your company is small to medium in size, Prophix is the system for you! Additionally, if your company is also doing monthly forecasting in Excel, Prophix will save you time and reduce errors. There are also many other worthwhile features, such as Account Reconciliation and consolidations.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Reporting - single report that can be opened by multiple users, each will see only aspect specific to them based on their security access.
• Budgeting - workflow driven budget data collection, visibility of its current status, ability to take action to ensure timely completion. Ability to snapshot budget data at a point in time. Ability to perform what-if scenarios.
• Forecasting - as above with added benefit of either reusing budget level of grain or forecasting at high level.
• Granular planning - ability to create unlimited number of subsidiary models to assist with the planning process. Non-financial data collected during budget/forecast process help with operation planning and variance analysis.

Incentivized

• 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).

Incentivized

• Prophix could improve on its dashboarding capability - it is very basic and we always present our graphs/visuals in Excel.
• We would love it if Prophix could improve its line item detail reports. They are not great right after downloading and require a lot of manipulation in Excel.
• It would be awesome if we could fully integrate our invoicing software with Prophix. This would allow us to view invoices within Prophix rather than having to go into another tool.

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.

The system works well for us, and meets all of our needs. All of our future plans can and will be achieved within Prophix, so there is no need to pursue another product. Prophix has continuously proven to improve their product over the years, which provides an even higher level of confidence in this tool, and future developments

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.

Incentivized

I have used other reporting software over the years and so far this has been the simplest to set up, the most flexible to use and we have not yet used Prophix to its full capacity. Over the next year or so I can see us extending our use of Prophix to include any number of other functions.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The availability in Prophix is relatively good. We have occurred random outages in different versions that wipe out data, which can be brought back. Or we have ran into system wide slowness that impacts all users in the system, but we have been able to get more capacity to supply our performance.

Incentivized

BlackLine performs rather quickly considering the amount of data we were pushing in and out of it.

Incentivized

Prophix has always performed consistently. We are using on-premise so many factors can contribute to slower than desired performance, most having nothing to do with Prophix itself. If we move to the web-client cloud based solution I believe performance will even be better.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The Prophix staff is very helpful and quick to respond. I like that they teach me instead of doing it for me when possible, so I don't have to contact them as often! Never talked to anyone at Prophix that I didn't respect or think highly of! Very professional, great customer service!

Incentivized

We worked with a consultant provided by the vendor for implementation. Training involved online and in person. The in person training was done throughout the implementation. It was very hands on training. As we worked through sections of the set-up, we were training on how to use various features within the product. It made learning the system very easy.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We used our system and created a test cube to work with our own data. We ran through the different functions of Prophix and covered alot of material. We did two sessions a week, with homework tasks assigned. We were able to ask questions and cover any questions during the followup sessions.

Incentivized

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

Prophix Consulting should bring, in house, chargeable expertise in Oracle EBS table access for Drill Across and provide reasonable limits on dimension member combinations so there are no unreasonable expectations about the application of multi dimensional cubes to detail, such as revenue by product and customer.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We felt Prophix was much more flexible than Briq and offered a more solid financial reporting and budgeting package. Briq is more custom built solution-focused. They build solutions to fit your specific needs. The primary reason we went with Prophix is that we wanted something we could tweak and design on our own after the initial build-out of the solution.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I gave Prophix a 10 on scalability because we currently deploy the solution to department heads across our entire organization and never have any issues with those individuals using or accessing the system to look at their financial information within premade templates . They currently enter budgets and review reports within the system currently. The only issue is they cannot typically use the ad hoc functionality because that would require higher level licenses that cost more and it is not worth it to give them more costly licenses since they really aren't working in the system quite like the robust finance users

Incentivized

• 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.

• Prophix has made it possible to move away from some Excel reporting we were doing, which allows for 50% quicker reporting on a monthly basis.
• Although it has saved us time, an improved PowerPoint feature that automatically updates our decks would save an additional 75% on top of what we already do.
• Our Board Reporting has improved by 10 hours by moving our reports fully into Prophix.