Item: BlackLine
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with BlackLine

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Financial close management, including daily certification of particular accounts, FDICIA/SOX compliant evidence of preparer and review, transaction matching, and subledger/ancillary application agreement. We utilize the transaction matching to a significant degree, saving time and ensuring completeness of our unmatched populations. The entire accounting function of the organization relies on BlackLine to consistently provide a bill of health for our balance sheet.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Transaction Matching
Robust record of certifications
Variety of options for external data source inputs
Variety of reconciliation templates available to suite most needs
Tasks module to record preparer and reviewer sign-offs and audit evidence

Cons

Better capabilities related to daily certification records
Capabilities to modify data source input file formats after initial setup
Indication of what supporting items have been pushed from an unmatched match set versus manually added

Return on Investment

Decreased accounting workload
Increased productivity
Increased accuracy and recordkeeping

Support Rating

Support has been responsive when needed. They are willing to hop on a scheduled call to review the issue in your sandbox or production environment. They also have robust educational resources, including live classes, an on demand learning platform, and their annual Beyond The Black conference. They also did a great job of steering us to an ideal implementation partner.

Partnership

We feel BlackLine will be our vendor/solution of choice for the foreseeable future. I view BlackLine as a catalyst for our organization and we had very limited internal controls and structure over balance sheet reconciliations. I wanted a comprehensive solution that had tailored reconciliations, rather than passing Excel workbooks across the organization for years to come.

Alternatives Considered

FloQast, Vena, Adra by Trintech, OneStream and Frontier Reconciliation

BlackLine lacked nothing in capabilities compared to the competition and was best in class in the categories that meant most to us: transaction matching, partnership approach, data integration, price

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?

Yes

Would you buy BlackLine again?

Yes

Other Software Used

SAP Concur, Finastra Fusion Digital Banking, Alteryx Platform

Likelihood to Recommend

Any context related to regulatory/SOX/FDICIA scrutiny, especially in the world of Community Banking we operate in. It allows us to generate system certification of the operating modules (teller, loans, and deposits) to the interfaced GL balances automatically. We also utilize automatic bank statement and transaction imports (BAI2 files) to ensure completeness and automate the majority of our daily transaction matching.

BlackLine Feature Ratings

Comments

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