BlackLine’s July 2022 Roundup

This monthly BlackLine update is published to keep you informed of customer success stories, upcoming events, helpful resources, best practices, and thought leadership from the leading cloud financial close solution.

Amidst the Great Resignation, companies are exploring how workspaces and company culture influence job performance and talent retention. A positive work environment contributes to employee learning, information sharing, and overall happiness.

Benefits mentioned by executives include flexible working policies, fostering work-life balance, and employee recognition programs, and at BlackLine, inclusion is a focus as well:

“As one of the first and only publicly traded technology companies with a female founder, inclusion and being open and accepting is part of our DNA. We celebrate diversity of thought and we value the range of perspectives that hiring employees from a range of backgrounds and cultures can provide,” said BlackLine Chief People Officer Susan Otto.

After modernizing the customer-facing processes of the business, Haven Savings Bank turned their focus to the manual back-office work that was error-prone and time-consuming. Reconciliations performed in spreadsheets limited visibility and efficiency.

After seeing a demonstration of BlackLine, Haven Savings Bank VP and controller (now CFO) Thomas Buthorn not only saw the benefits automation could bring to their month-end reconciliations, but in managing the complete end-to-end close process.

After implementing BlackLine, they reduced the time to perform these functions and boosted employee morale.

“Staff is taking on more value-added work, such as compliance,” says Buthorn. “BlackLine has made them happier, as well. They no longer have to deal with preparing all of these files anymore. They can go straight to analyzing.”

What is the month-end? Also coined the financial close, the month-end and F&A processes the term encompasses describes the record-to-report activities companies must perform at the period-end to produce timely, accurate, and compete financial statements.

These activities, which a whopping 70% of CAOs say need improving, include substantiating balance sheet accounts, reconciling transactions, recording recurring journal entries, analyzing variances, monitoring critical tasks and controls, and supporting audits.

Many believe that modernization—leveraging technology to increase efficiency—is the answer.

In a hybrid workforce, gone are the days when F&A teams could rely on paper spreadsheets to collaborate. With time-consuming, manual processes contributing to employee dissatisfaction, modernizing accounting is one way finance is banishing the back-office blues.

Here are the four ways accounts receivable automation with BlackLine can MOVE financial operations forward:

M: Make better decisions by enabling doubt-free decision making with real-time visibility and accurate data

O: Operational success helps mitigate unnecessary process errors and bottlenecks

V: Visibility into the future gives you full insight into your cash position

E: Employee satisfaction increases with time savings so your team can focus on strategic, value-added work

Closing the Gaps in Critical Finance and Accounting Processes with Automation – July 21, 2022