BlackLine automates the the processes required to finalize periodic closing of the books. Beyond close/reconciliation management the product includes capabilities to enhance the management and control of financial processes throughout the accounting cycle. In October 2020, BlackLine acquired Rimilia, an AR automation solution. Rimilia's capabilities are now part of the BlackLine platform.
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Wolters Kluwer CCH® Tagetik
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Tagetik is a corporate performance management solution that unifies budgeting, financial planning, consolidation and management reporting. Tagetik is offered as SaaS, on a private cloud, or on-premise, and can migrate between deployments as needed.
We use Wolters Kluwer CCH® Tagetikfor budgeting, reporting, and consolidation already for a couple of years. And to speed up our (monthly / quarterly) close, we recently implemented the transaction matching and account reconciliation modules from Wolters Kluwer CCH® Tagetik. …
BlackLine has worked well for our companies, as we have a very old ERP system that is limited to what can be done within the system. Everything was done manually through Excel and binders to keep everything together, and each location had their own way of closing, so there was no consistency. It took longer to complete our close, and it created opportunities for a lack of separation of duties within the process. BlackLine has everything in one place, easy viewing of past months, strict separation of duties implemented (based on your specifications,) easy viewing for an auditor to get everything they need without a lot of hands on from the team, and works the same across all of our global locations, but in their local language and currency. BlackLine may not be a huge assist to those that have ERP systems that can handle doing the Recs, the JE's, the approvals, etc., all within its own system, as long as every location is on the same system. If they are all on different accounting systems, BlackLine can assist in providing consistency across all accounting locations, so processes can be the same no matter where they are located.
Scenarios where CCH Tagetik is suitable is when a company have large amounts of data and want to transform, consolidate, store and produce reporting in different year, period etc with complex calculations and allocation. Tagetik is the tool for you in this case and it's very flexible in terms of creating your own business rule, calculation and reporting options with a user friendly interface. I have not thought about scenarios where it is not appropriate to use tagetik yet as the tool covers small and large business financial needs
Saving time! Our manual process became automated the minute we "turned on" Blackline!
Focus! By saving time using Blackline, our employees are able to focus on other job responsibilities and profit-generation
Support! Blackline's support throughout our implementation and post-implementation has been exceptional. We always receive timely responses and get answers fast, when needed
User Friendly! Their system is very easy to navigate. Even individuals in our organization that don't like or embrace change said the transition to Blackline was smooth and painless
Processes are clearly described in CCH Tagetik ; users can easily find where they are and which action they have to make
Interaction with Excel is really fluid ; the Excel add-in is easy to deploy and to updgrade, in the hand of users. It is reliable provided the internet connection is fast.
Managing hierachies is obvious in CCH Tagetik. Hierarchies are fundamental for a good reporting ; CCH Tagetik has obviously a deep experience of this feature.
SaaS : our experience with CCH Tagetik is of only 1 year, but it technically performs well, the system is reponsive, no shut-down, and updates (every quarter) do not disturb production.
AIH seems to be able to manage very large quantity of data, and to provide advanced analysis functionalities. We did not have time to explore them.
Early functionality for Oracle users - a lot of the new products are only for use by SAP users.
Access to API data to improve the reporting of data out of BlackLine.
Ability to create reports in BlackLine across data sources.
Ability to email reports out of BlackLine (either ad-hoc or scheduled reports) as opposed to the current process of having the user access BlackLine to retrieve the report.
Because this is a great tool with many possibilities and cool perks. Plus, as an admin - because I am both user and admin - I can say that this is easy to handle, you don't even have to be able to write a single piece of code to do so
Because in my oppinion Wolters Kluwer CCH Tagetik is one of the most usable tools for consolidation, planning (controlling) and reporting. Its usability is quite easy and innovative. I like the data entry method for the customers with its workflow and tasks, quite easy way to implement a co pilot. And i like the reporting tool, with a lot of customization opportunities.
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.
Surprisingly, this platform is a powerhouse ERP system. However, given time, when more and more organization is able to identify how powerful this tool can be, CCH Tagetik is able to stand as a competitive advantage to many of the Financial industry of today. Although, it needs time to understand the logic behind how CCH Tagetik is formed and setup, once it is known to the user, it is an easy day to day operations with minimal maintenance.
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.
CCH Tagetik has alwyas been there in case we need help. In almost 20 years of commercial relationship, I have no evidence of times in which they were not available to answer a question or to solve an issue linked to their products, timely and efficiently.
As you can see, speed depends on the applications but also on the hardware that runs them. As far as CCH Tagetik improved, we saw the benefit of a cloud-based solution which could solve many speed performance issues.
In my experience, the support team is beyond exceptional. They are incredibly knowledgeable and dedicated to the customer. You can expect prompt, professional and succinct responses. I have been working with the support team for BlackLine for more than ten years where I have been a customer four times. If anyone does Support right, it is definitely BlackLine. Not only can you trust your financials, but you can trust the team to support you through all your objectives!
I got very quick respons. After very little mail iterations, they decided to have online meeting to look together with me to the issue. They tried to solve it during the meeting. I had the impression that the customer care person really knew the system and was able to ask help from other colleagues when needed
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.
Online training is the only form of training we could deploy during the pandemic. This service has been nonethless delivered with the same standards and the same results of the traditional training procedures.
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 did it in a coaching model. This allowed us to have 2 key advantages: we got to know the system very well and managed to save on the implementation cost. This worked well, was maybe a bit slower since we had to do this in our spare time. Nevertheless I strongly recommand
I have not used any products similar to Blackline. However, Excel does offer many similar functionalities to Blackline in terms of reconciling accounts. Blackline offers many benefits over simply using Excel. The reconciliations are organized and easy to find, and they roll over each month on their own. They include the ability to auto-certify if they meet the criteria that your team selects. They also include an audit trail of documentation and approval for each step.
I found the Excel piece of IBM Cognos TM1 to be easier to use than CCH Tagetik. It was much easier to customize the data being pulled and the feel of the reports because of that. Other than that, CCH Tagetik has been more user friendly than IBM Cognos TM1. Navigating within the application is much easier. IBM Cognos TM1 had a lot of issues with certain modules that could not be open concurrently; this would often lead to phantom data being entered in the system. I have not had these issues with CCH Tagetik.
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.
A good and performing scalability both on a geographical and a legal entity scale. The link with MS Office suite allows an easy deployment of the application, especially for contributors.
More insight into balance sheet account balances. Our team is more timely with getting errors fixed and monitoring important accounts.
The task management tool helps us ensure that we are completing all accruals and reviews each month. This has led to fewer errors and missing accruals.
Our use of BlackLine has greatly increased our efficiency by reducing manual work.
Gave us a tool that can absolutely grow with us to help multi phase implementations.
A significant time savings in terms of the amount of time we used to spend running reports vs. the time we spend now. Unbelievable improvement.
Gives us the option to use CCH Tagetik to solve business problems that perhaps we didn't have when we implemented CCH Tagetik. It gives us options without the possibility of implementing a whole other software package.
