BlackLine

It is overall a good product for Reconciliations based on other products that I use. It is laid out well and easy to train on.

BlackLine is a good tool help to reduce error when posting financial adjustment. The approver can clearly see all the supporting documents and related entries which certainly help to reduce time to find it manually.
The fallback will be the slow response from the system when searching the journal entries under department.

Good 1. Account Reconciliations 2. Journal Entries 3. Task Management 4. Team Structures Not So Good 1. Controlling of some user/account assignments by date 2. Alert Preferences at the User level 3. Programming Languages for AJD's

BlackLine is a great solution for your Accounting close process needs. It is very easy to us for your month-end reconciliation and documentation of tasks. It has great technology to support transaction matching and journal entries. It has capabilities to help with your intercompany accounting processes and financial reporting. If an onboarding is well-thought from the very start, it can be a very powerful solution. The challenge we have is how to utilize all that BlackLine has to offer when we already have an ERP system that offers some of these capabilities (like journal entries).

I have only used BlackLine with my current company, and I have always had success with using BlackLine as a solution. We have automated quite a few processes and continue to look for more ways to leverage BlackLine and its modules to optimize our processes. I approach any potential BlackLine project from the perspective that it may not be the solution, but I can try and have had much success. The only project that I have not been able to migrate to BlackLine is my SOX controls, but I will probably give them another try as I gain more experience with the system.

It is good for tailoring journal templates to the company's needs e.g. we added fields like project codes and job types specific to real estate company.
You can add validation checks that might not be possible in the existing ERP system and tailor this as required - although testing is required.

Blackline is a great tool to move toward automation and get a change management and automation plan in motion. I haven’t found anything that Blackline isn’t appropriate for. Generally the Blackline tool works great when it is set up and used as intended. That being said, it takes time and focus to implement correctly. Investment of time up front reaps the benefits.

It is helpful for companies that have a large amount of reconciliations or tasks to track on a monthly basis. It helps with approval workflows and audit trails.

BlackLine is extremely useful for journals, tasks, recs, reporting, and matching! There isn't anything BlackLine can't do! It seriously helped to make the month-end close more smooth and efficient. BlackLine handles all of our accounting needs. Reporting helps to make variance analysis a breeze. Rec templates help ensure consistency. Automatic journals help to alleviate the busy work for preparers. It's a win for your team to have BlackLine.

It is suitable to use for organizations that have monthly and quarterly financial closes, to expedite the process, reduce manual effort, and ensure timely reporting. Our organization subjects to frequent audits, Blackline's comprehensive audit trail can simplify the audit process, provide transparency, and ease the burden of preparing documentation for auditors. On the other hand, Blackline is a cloud-based solution, so without reliable internet connectivity might struggle to access and utilize the software effectively when work from home.

Account reconciliations can be standardized with various template options to choose from depending on the type of account. Account reconciliations can even be set up with amortization schedules that are easily customizable and accounts have the option to auto-certify. Tasks help our team to monitor, certify, and collaborate. It's nice that tasks can be set up with custom frequencies.

Task tracking makes it easy for me to see where we stand during close as well as the tasks upcoming during the month to stay on track. It eliminates tracking in excel where copy/paste errors can be more likely. It also allows upper management a central location for them to view. Auditors having access to recons is a great time saving aspect as well.

In my opinion, BlackLine is well suited for the more popular ERPs like SAP, Oracle, Dynamics. Although we made it work with Deltek Vision, it required a lot of customization on our end in Vision to make the data integration work. the magic of BlackLine is in the intel of the actual application which helps us apply cash very quickly and better than our in house built application

BlackLine is very well suited to match large sets of data to generate journal entries.

I think blackline can be suited for all types of business with a bit of modification. But it is well suited for any corporate or backend finance function. It can replace various excel manual processes. It will be difficult to use where technical like usage if accounting standard or taxation guidance is required or any law changes

Blackline was well suited to work with our ancient ERP system. Blackline was honest in stating that they had never worked with a system like ours and we didn't have any real problems once we got started. I also specifically enjoy the AI and trusting that payments will be auto matched based off of the prior history of that payment.

E.g. when you would like to design your own account recon ways - it can help with a great many perks. You can import accounts in various ways as well. There you have them rules to auto-certify, also the threshold is there for the same reason. Bulk review. Dual-level (and even more ;)) approval. Quickly to perform, easy to understand and oversee. Fast to review and, oh, there are the notes you can leave for one an other!

Idea implementation though is a bit of a hard nut to crack here - one needs to upload the idea on a very place called Product Ideas, where others can upvote those. The necessary minimum? I do not know. But some says, there were ideas implemented for free for all BL users... SO, I do believe them.

It is helpful in documenting everything we need it to for SOX compliance. It reduces the time spent answering auditor questions as we direct them to BlackLine for the majority of schedules and support.

It could probably be a 10 but I don't have appropriate training to be able to appropriately utilize the software

BlackLine is incredibly robust when it comes to transaction matching. The functionality of creating match rules helps the users come up with ways to match over 95% of the transactions and makes it easy to understand how to make sure that the data entered into your accounting ERP will jive with the given rules. BlackLine can also be used in many more situations, and the flexibility of the software allows for your accounting team's creativity to create automated solutions. While they do offer customer service and will work with you to build more automation solutions, I would recommend that you have a team that is more tech-savvy or innovative.

BlackLine helped us gain significant efficiency, quality and control improvements, which allowed us to increase workload in our Shared centers without adding people. Audit findings were reduced, and reconciling items in account reconciliations were reduced in both quantity and time outstanding. Automation of journal entries and account reconciliations have allowed better insight as to how things are done, and helped to eliminate unnecessary journal entries, while enabling more consistency in supporting documentation, which greatly helped both our auditors and personnel reviewing and approving journal entries. The Smart Close tool is a HUGE asset if you use SAP. Substantial opportunity for efficiency and quality gain, internal control improvement, and process simplification and harmonization.

Based on my limited experience, Blackline is extremely well suited for Reconciliation with Matching.

Scenario 1 Reconciliations save in different network folders on the company's network, documentation no available , big accounting staff turnover BlackLine will centralize templates fully secure on the cloud, balances will flow automatically to the system therefore it does not matter who comes and go accountants should be able to read instructions and complete the appropriate reconciliations

One thing we found is that you need to have your recons laid out before you start recons in Blackline. There are many options in there so discussing the appropriate way to create a recon in BL before implementation might be better.

One other thing we found is that Matching is a much quicker implementation if you already have the account you're wanting to create a Match Set on completely reconciled. This will not help you reconcile an account that is really large without drawing a line in the sand for a write off threshold.

Blackline is an excellent transition from manual processes such as excel reconciliations and excel task lists. The reconciliation module electronically stores the reconciliation, support and workflow all in one place. Tasks can be scheduled based on the desired frequency and due dates so that no tasks is overlooked.