Create consistency with BlackLine
November 23, 2020

Create consistency with BlackLine

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with BlackLine

BlackLine is primarily being used as an account reconciliation software and is used company wide in North America. It creates a unified presentation for account reconciliations as well as putting an emphasis on timeliness, consistency, and accessibility of the month-end balances. Our company is just getting started with the journal entry and task management products, but with these products implemented, our month-end will be much more automated and we will have better communication across the organization, with a focus on analytics rather than repetitive processes that provide little added value.

Pros

  • Automated Reconciliations - Ability to focus on the important accounts and outliers
  • Customer Service - The BlackLine customer service team is always willing to offer support and show us how to improve our use of Blackline, without pressuring us to purchase more products
  • Continuous Improvement - BlackLine has a focus on continuous improvement and customer satisfaction. They listen to the feedback of their customers and provide multiple methods of providing said feedback.
  • Conferences - The BlackLine conference every year is very helpful for networking and learning how other users are taking advantages of Blackline services, as well as keeping the users updated on new products and improvements that are coming available.

Cons

  • More use cases - I would love to see more examples of customer use cases other than at the conference.
  • Training materials - BlackLine provides numerous methods of learning more about the products, but they are pretty generic.
  • Maintenance - The primary downfall I have seen with BlackLine is that depending on how you have your account hierarchy set up, it can be difficult to maintain. There is also not much training on how to do account maintenance in bulk - account groupings, changing frequencies, creating new periods, etc.
  • Increased consistency
  • Standardized processes
  • Sped up month end close processes
  • Provided additional checks and balances
  • Increased visibility across the organization

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?

No

Would you buy BlackLine again?

Yes

BlackLine is great as a method of generating consistency across the organization and is easy to use as a preparer of the software. It also provides a method to emphasize the key pieces of information/accounts that are important to the organization and do a minimal amount on accounts that are lower risk.
The BlackLine customer service reps are friendly and always willing to help when we need them. They are flexible with their time, and go out of their way to learn how we can improve our BlackLine experience. The solutions when we work with our customer service rep are generally tailored to our company and they have use cases with other companies that they are willing to share with us to improve our experience.
BlackLine is great at providing consistency across the organization and providing structure to the account reconciliation process. It is not necessarily an easy rollout process, so if you do not have the support of IT, you may face some difficulties. Overall, I would recommend this software to anyone looking to standardize their month-end process and/or increase their ability to organize the month-end process and related communication across the organization.

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