How Creditsafe Streamlined Invoice-to-Cash and Achieved 234% ROI with BlackLine

Creditsafe is used by tens of thousands of businesses around the world to minimize their credit risk. Touted as the world’s most used supplier of credit reports, the company offers access to credit information on over 430 million businesses. The company has 16 offices worldwide, including in Europe, North America, and Japan.

And like almost all expanding and globalized companies, their F&A teams were facing some significant growing pains.

What happens when a fast-growing global company runs finance operations on spreadsheets?

Let’s go back about eight years. Creditsafe had big ambitions – they were growing fast, expanding into new countries, and setting their sights on becoming the go-to source for business credit data worldwide.

But behind the scenes, things were a little messy.

Here’s what they were up against:

• Manual processes everywhere. Collections and financial operations were spread across countries, but everything was being managed through Excel. This led to version control nightmares and limited visibility across the org.

• No clear view of overdue accounts. The decentralized setup made it tough to get a handle on who owed what and when. Because of this, the collections team focused mostly on large accounts while smaller ones tended to slip through the cracks.

• Cash forecasting? Practically impossible. Without the right tools, planning for cash flow and assessing credit risk was a guessing game.

• Multiple countries, multiple currencies, one big headache. Trying to coordinate collections across borders was error-prone and time-consuming.

• No in-house dev resources. Building a custom financial system wasn’t an option for Creditsafe – they needed an external solution that could scale with them.

As Creditsafe kept growing, so did the friction in their finance processes. It was clear they needed an AR automation solution. They needed to get paid faster, and they needed to unlock the kind of financial visibility and control a global company can’t live without these days.

After evaluating several vendors (including HighRadius and BlackLine), BlackLine won out for several reasons, including:

• Flexibility in handling multiple currencies, such as USD, Euro, and Swedish Krona.

• Capability to support expansion into new markets like APAC.

• Comprehensive accounts receivable functionality that encompasses collections and cash allocation.

• AI-driven automation and intelligence.

Rolling out a global finance solution isn’t exactly plug-and-play (no matter how out-of-the-box it may be) – this is a challenge many companies face when embarking on a digital finance transformation. So, once Creditsafe made the (dare we say excellent) decision to go with BlackLine, they elected to do a phased approach.

With offices in multiple countries and teams juggling different currencies, Creditsafe knew one big go-live launch wasn’t going to cut it. Instead, they took a smart, phased approach to implementing BlackLine.

Here’s how they made it work:

• One country at a time. They started with the Netherlands because of the smaller ledger and simpler setup. It was up and running within six months. Then came the UK, which was more complex and needed extra time to map out reasons for non-payment. Subsequent country rollouts took two to three months.

• Cash application first, then collections. They prioritized getting the cash application solution in place before layering on collections management. Implementing order-to-cash allocation first benefitted the team because proper cash allocation improved collections efficiency.

• Lean team, big impact. The entire rollout, spanning from 2017 to just before the pandemic in 2020, was handled by a small but mighty crew: two IT folks, the Head of Credit Collections, and a handful of BlackLine experts.

In short: the implementation was smooth, strategic, and delivered serious ROI (an amazing 234%), just in time to weather the global disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic that followed.

You may be asking – where did that huge ROI come from?

Nucleus Research analyzed the costs of the following over three years to quantify Creditsafe’s total investment in BlackLine:

• Software

• Hardware

• Personnel

• Professional services

• User training

Nucleus Research determined that the benefits quantified can be attributed to significant time savings realized by employees at Creditsafe once they implemented BlackLine’s Invoice-to-Cash solution.

Beyond that incredible ROI, implementing BlackLine delivered other benefits for Creditsafe, including enhanced cash allocation efficiency, improved cash inflow processing, increased collections management productivity, and supported international expansion. Let’s dig into those a little bit.

Streamlining Cash Allocation from Two Days to Two Hours

For Creditsafe, each month-end closing required two full days of manual cash allocation, which was tedious and error-prone. With BlackLine, 90% of their payments are auto-matched to customer accounts straight from bank statements, manual data entry is nearly eliminated, and the month-end process is reduced from two days to two hours.

Real results: One employee reclaimed 170 hours a year (roughly $4,000 in value) and took on more strategic work like managing legal accounts and direct debit payments.

Reducing Time Spent on Manual Work

Before BlackLine, the credit team spent a full day manually entering payments, matching invoices, and reconciling accounts.

Now? Daily processing time is down to just 90 minutes and 90% of payments auto-match with BlackLine’s cash allocation module.

Real results: Roughly 1,700 hours saved annually across five team members, worth nearly $200,000. With that time back, the team now focuses on high-risk accounts and deeper financial analysis.

Decreasing Process Times

Before BlackLine, just pulling weekly collection call lists took up to two hours per person – every week! Now, this process takes just 10 minutes per week.

In addition, BlackLine is helping the team reduce the time it takes to perform the reporting process for monthly 90-day bad debt. What once took six days was reduced to just two days.

Real results: The collection call list optimization saved 95 hours per employee, per year, across about 30 people (worth over $44,000 in time), plus saving another manager 385 hours a year (another $16,000 in value) with the bad-debt process.

Scaling Globally

As mentioned at the start, Creditsafe was looking to grow the company and expand into new markets. But without centralization of their financial and collections processes, they were facing significant challenges.

BlackLine delivered:

• Multi-currency support and flexibility for different regulatory and payment norms.

• Forecasting tools that gave the team deeper insight into customer behavior and cash flow trends.

• Consistent processes across regions, so collections and cash allocation stayed on track no matter the market.

Real results: Creditsafe expanded confidently from 7 to 16 offices, including Japan, knowing their financial processes were consistent and scalable.