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Our experience with BlackLine
November 23, 2020

Our experience with BlackLine

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
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.
  • 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
  • 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

  • Carefully thought out and less complex EUI for great user experiences. This was a plus on the count of user acceptance and adoption during the deployment.
  • Informative dashboards for monitoring progress of various reconciliations during the monthly process
  • BlackLine affords us the opportunity to leverage on automation to avoid some recurring or repetitive tasks in the monthly process.
  • The flexibility to get key changes required post go-live implemented. The technical team have been very patient and accommodating for which we are very happy.
  • We get timely resolution of technical issues reported by the team especially during deployment
  • Great user community to ensure knowledge and experience sharing and networking
  • With the high volume of transactions in a typical Oilfield Service organization, BlackLine offers a better platform for having all the monthly general ledgers of multiple countries and entities for reconciliation.
  • The pre-setup accounts reconciliation templates streamline the preparation and presentation of various categories of accounting transactions (by nature) reconciliation schedules/supports. Some templates offer automated update functionality which cuts down repetition of some tasks.

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
  • To continue to enjoy and leverage on the automation functionalities BlackLine offers for this process.
  • Make more gains on running this process efficiently and keep our Finance Teams on high-end value addition projects
  • With a foreseeable increase in transaction volumes when activities pick up, we need a tool we can really on to handle the volume