Item: BlackLine
Rating: 9
Author: Christopher Boutros

Overall Satisfaction with BlackLine

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

BlackLine is used to monitor our close processes, account reconciliations, and task management. It is only used in our accounting department, but benefits the entire company by ensuring that the data is accurate. We used to manage the close process in Excel which yielded no accountability and did not assure us that the work was getting done accurately.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to use UI.
BlackLine system training.
Automation.

Cons

Not all fields have an audit trail.
Financial Reporting is a separate module.

Return on Investment

SGA savings.

Support Rating

They are timely and always willing to help.

Partnership

Blackline has allowed us to reduce our close time from 45 days to 30 days and we are still continuing to improve our processes each month with an end goal of a 7 day (or less) close process.

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Cloud ePm and FloQast

Oracle Consolidations and Close has been evaluated, but it is significantly harder to get set up and easier to break.

Key Insights

Do you think BlackLine delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with BlackLine's feature set?

Yes

Did BlackLine live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of BlackLine go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy BlackLine again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

It really depends on the needs of the company, but any company that needs to monitor and automate their close process, my first choice is BlackLine.

BlackLine Feature Ratings

Close Task Management
Reconciliation Automation
Automated Journal Entries

Future Planned Uses

We can use Blackline to automate cash reconciliations

Likelihood to Renew

The system has the capability to improve and speed up our close process more than it already does. In order to do this, our company needs to fine tune our structure and SOPs.

I recommend BlackLine