Enjoying a cup of coffee with family and friends thanks to BlackLine!
Updated December 27, 2022
Enjoying a cup of coffee with family and friends thanks to BlackLine!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with BlackLine
Starbucks initially implemented the BlackLine solution to go paperless for journals (using tasks) and reconciliation preparation and approval back in 2012. In 2019 we implemented the matching and journal module for our revenue accounting team, which supports over 10,000 retail stores and roughly 1.5 billion in sales monthly. After a few years of learnings and working with BlackLine and various account managers, we were able to realize time savings of over 200 hours per month for a single team. In 2021, journals and matching expanded to other teams within the Starbucks accounting organization, and another 200 hours per month of time savings were achieved. This took partnering with members of the BlackLine development team and having some tough conversations with our support teams at BlackLine. We had some challenges with new releases and had to actively work to understand the impact to our users and escalate tickets as needed. In 2022 we hit a good stride and truly had an amazing story to share. As winners of the 2022 Modern Accounting Award, Starbucks was recognized as pioneers. I value our partnership with BlackLine, UHY, and our internal technology department to achieve success to date.
- Listens to customer feedback to make an improved product.
- Open to companies challenging the status quo and finding solutions that may not have been thought of before.
- Working with cutting edge companies to come up with new products and solutions.
- Early functionality for Oracle users - a lot of the new products are only for use by SAP users.
- Access to API data to improve the reporting of data out of BlackLine.
- Ability to create reports in BlackLine across data sources.
- Ability to email reports out of BlackLine (either ad-hoc or scheduled reports) as opposed to the current process of having the user access BlackLine to retrieve the report.
- Automations resulting in employees having time to spend on value add work.
- Ability to customize and build many of the automations in house.
- Partnership with BlackLine developers and a dedicated strategic manager.
- Willingness to listen to concerns, ideas, and ultimately create a better product together.
- Talent retention by creating roles with value-add work and reducing the mundane.
- Promotion opportunities for those that have embraced BlackLine and have taken on more complex and more rewarding work as a result of the automation achieved.
- Time savings which allowed teams to take on new projects without increasing headcount and without employee burnout.
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?
No
Did implementation of BlackLine go as expected?
No
Would you buy BlackLine again?
Yes
Using BlackLine
313 - Accounting, Treasury, Financial Reporting, and Audit
2 - Ability to embrace technology and think outside the box. Can handle change well and help others with change. Pushes past failures to learn and ultimately build a better product. Clearly communicates with leaders where they need support internally and externally in order to achieve results. Patience Curiosity Growth mindset Patience (I know I listed that already but patience is sooo important) Ability to inspire others to take a leap of faith to try something new. Risk taker with healthy boundaries. In addition to that, a leader that embraces and empowers their employee to be the person above. Leadership support and encouragement is so incredibly important. No one should take this journey alone. They need to find their tribe and be able to network with others both internally and externally. They need the support to be able to fail and pick themselves up with a little support and try again.
- Bank reconciliation automations
- Transactional matching for retail store deposits
- Paperless workflow
- Audit support and record retention
- Automations through integrations with our ledger for improved journal process
- Data source rules that allow us to take in data from another source and add attributes through rules to be able to create automated journals and ultimately reconciliations that can auto certify.
- Ability to create task dependencies to better manage work flow during close week.
- Reports that can help analyze data and time savings (requires users to fill in specific fields first).
- Automated journals on data sources reducing the manual efforts done by accountants on large data sets.
- Reason codes on one-sided matches that allowed for automated journals to clear exceptions in matching faster and with more accurate results.
- In the next few years, we will look at Variance Analysis to see what teams can benefit from the module.
- Journals can be used by more teams in accounting once we have new multi-currency templates (SOW in progress) to fully replace the current Oracle API upload process.
- Currently slated to try out accounting studio as early adopters.