Turbocharge Your Financial Close with Accenture & BlackLine

By Shelly Harper, Accenture

For Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), access to accurate and timely financial information is a strategic imperative. It’s critical to business performance and success and the life-blood of a company’s reinvention and value-creating ambitions. Yet, according to Accenture’s latest CFO Forward Study, quality data is the most significant barrier to delivering business value.

Material misstatements in external financial reporting can significantly damage a company’s reputation and negatively affect shareholder value. Internally, inaccurate management financial reporting results in lost opportunity and less effective decision-making.

An accelerated and efficient financial consolidation and close provides faster financial performance data to decision-makers. Critically, it allows finance leaders to focus on value-added activities, evaluate corporate performance in real-time, and plan for the future.

According to our work with clients across the globe, leading finance organizations:

• Deliver reports 35–50% faster than their peers (2–3 days vs 5–6 days)

• Use 40–50% less resources and avoid material misstatements

To deliver an accelerated and efficient close, CFOs and finance leaders need to focus their attention across three critical business levers: policies and process, people and organization, and technology.

Policy and process: Align policies to your business and regulatory requirements. Define materiality thresholds and focus on value-added work. Simplify and standardize your processes and cut low and non-value add activities.

People and organization: Recent Accenture research shows that it’s people who make a critical difference in capturing more value from a company’s data and technology. With that in mind, skills development and training is a top priority, and process activity needs to be aligned to the proper personnel.

Technology: Technology is a top driver of business value, as revealed in our recent research. In the financial reporting and closing space, tech solutions like electronic invoicing presentment and payment (EIPP), which automate customer and supplier transactions, or robotic process automation (RPA) and optical character recognition (OCR), which help automate invoice processing, are critical. Solutions from companies like BlackLine can integrate and extend enterprise resource planning (ERP) functionality and help bridge the gaps in core and complex finance and accounting processes.

As a first step, consider tapping into the power of our ecosystem network members BlackLine and SAP.

Accenture’s global network of BlackLine and SAP professionals, with deep industry and function experience, work with our ecosystem partners across geographies to craft and develop innovative solutions and assets to help you streamline and strengthen any financial close process. Our experience building cloud-based financial close solutions with our partners has been very helpful for companies in all areas, especially those with complex technology infrastructure or operating systems.

Companies with enterprise applications that work together and can exchange data create long-lasting value. According to Accenture analysis, these companies with high interoperability can grow revenue 6X faster than peers with low interoperability.

BlackLine offers an integrated platform and solutions to support a company’s entire close process. When used with the SAP S/4HANA financial management software, companies can automate, speed up, and improve their main finance and accounting operations. They can also make their financial close and reporting stronger.

Key benefits include:

• Integration of multiple ERP and non-ERP systems

• Automation of routine tasks for increased operational efficiencies

• Building complete visibility across processes

• Complete traceability and audit trail

• Improved data management across multiple sources

Our clients value how the BlackLine and SAP solutions can help them in three ways: journal entries, processes between companies, and account reconciliation and matching.

Companies have a central repository to make, review, approve, and record all manual journal entries before posting them from a central web-based platform. This also supports rule-based complex calculations.

They also like how a single platform for transactions between companies can meet their needs for reconciliation and settlement. This includes automating transfer prices and tax calculations for activities that are not traded between companies.

Finally, the rule-based matching and balance sheet reconciliation capabilities make the process easier. This saves time and gives controllers a complete view of the account reconciliation and matching work.

Accenture’s global and cross-sector finance transformation experience, know-how, capabilities, and ecosystem network of technology alliances like BlackLine and SAP can help you reinvent your finance function and improve your finance close and reporting. Please reach out for an in-depth discussion on how to transform your financial consolidation, close, and reporting, or stop by our booth at the upcoming BeyondTheBlack conference in Orlando, November 18-20, 2024.