Our experience with BlackLine
November 23, 2020
Our experience with BlackLine

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with BlackLine
Our Finance department uses BlackLine for our monthly accounts reconciliations. Since we moved this process to BlackLine, we have done away with the multiple excel files we used in the past. This has simplified and standardized the way reconciliation is done for various groups of accounts and across the various Finance sub-functions. We've also benefited from the visibility and ease of handling the volumes.
Pros
- Auto offset functionality in the reconciliation process
- Ease of reconciling volumes of transactions by leveraging on cloud and automation platform
- Visible risk identification and monitoring to ensure a focused efforts to manage them
Cons
- Flexibility to interface directly with wide variety of ERPs
- In built functionalities to consolidate detailed open items
- Reference manual/book on the functions of mechanical features in EUI
- Increased efficiency in the accounts reconciliation proocess
- Visibility of the risk profile of all our balance sheet accounts
- Some extra effort and focus is required when migrating from a non-standard model to BlackLine. But I must mention that, this brought us the required simplification and standardization we needed.
- BlackLine
Backline is the first of a kind that we have used for our monthly account reconciliation processes. Compared to our previous tools and platform, it is by far the best in terms of
- handling the volume of transactions without having to face the problems of performing such tasks in excel.
- available technical support for the timely resolution of issues
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
Using BlackLine
1000 - BlackLine is used by our Finance function which comprises of the support Hubs (General Accounting, Treasury, Tax, Billing, Business insight team that is focused on corporate level reporting, and the Governance and Compliance Team), the field controllers and assistant controllers, tax managers and assistant tax managers (including country tax compliance experts), and Internal Audit.
200 - Our key internal support groups
- Super Users who are trained be be the first point of contact for addressing user issues
- BlackLine User Admins who interface between users and the System Admins to drive standardization, organize user trainings, run centralised BlackLine tasks, and collaborate with users on data updates and feedback.
- System Admins who help on back-end system updates and modifications
- Monthly Account reconciliations for leading ledger
- Standardization and simplification of reconciliation schedules/supports
- Maintain a risk based approach to monitoring balance sheet accounts
- Synchronizing BlackLine risk identification to our internal reporting. This used to be manual but with BlackLine, we have been able to bring it online and made it more visible.
- BI dashboards to summarise open items for monitoring and and audit purposes
- Using accounts reconciliation on non-leading ledgers
- Driving concurrency between accounts reconciliation of leading and non-leading ledgers
Comments
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