Item: BlackLine
Rating: 10
Author: Naomi Garcia, MBA

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use BlackLine to reconcile and manage more than 1m properties. Currently we are leveraging BlackLine to work through account reconciliations related to Construction, Development, Property and Fund accounting for our logistics real estate clients. We reconcile at the property level to allow us to see detail which can be complicated by the different phases of the real estate cycle. BlackLine allows us to have a more comprehensive and trustworthy insight to our financials, which is essential to our public parent company. Being able to report confidently in critical times is imperative to our continued success. Naturally BlackLine filled the gap!

Pros and Cons

Reporting is dynamic and user friendly
Matching is sophisticated enough to shave off hours
Auto-Reconciliation is a lifesaver

Journals could be a little more intuitive and robust
Would love to see more APIs, particularly with Yardi or customizable for any ERP
Embed AI for all customers to use across the platform entirely- not just for journals or matching

Return on Investment

Improved visibility
Decreased workload
Confident financials

Support Rating

In my experience, the support team is beyond exceptional. They are incredibly knowledgeable and dedicated to the customer. You can expect prompt, professional and succinct responses. I have been working with the support team for BlackLine for more than ten years where I have been a customer four times. If anyone does Support right, it is definitely BlackLine. Not only can you trust your financials, but you can trust the team to support you through all your objectives!

Partnership

We rely on our BlackLine partners to help guide us through our strategy and goals in order to be successful. Currently we are working through expanded adoption on account recs and in the near future we will utilize our Customer Success Manager to guide us through optimizing our reconciliation templates. After that we are going to look to expand our product suite. We couldn't do it without our amazing partnership!

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy BlackLine again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Yardi Voyager, Argus, Anaplan

Likelihood to Recommend

BlackLine allows us to have a more comprehensive and trustworthy insight to our financials which is essential to our public parent company. However, I would love to see BlackLine integrate more seamlessly with Yardi and other ERP systems to continue to mitigate risk with file transfer automation. The dashboards are also very intuitive for most users, however I would love to see interactive dashboards for system admins as well

Best in Class... from a 4x customer

Overall Satisfaction with BlackLine