A practical guide to
revolutionizing your
record-to-report process
with financial close automation

Before you get started with your bank reconciliation workflow, you need a way to get visibility into each stage of the process. Let’s say you’re a controller. To do your job most effectively, you need an easy way to see what’s left to be completed in each of your financial close processes. And that’s a pretty major task because those critical accounting activities are often slow, manual processes, with little coordination—especially bank reconciliations. You need a clear line of sight. What you often get is an endless checklist and a bunch of inconsistencies.

BlackLine attacks this problem with Task Management. It’s a configurable, cloud-based command center where you can seamlessly manage and automate your finance and accounting tasks.

Task Management also includes cloud-based dashboards. These provide real-time visibility into status, timeliness, content, and quality of each task—so you can ensure nothing falls through the cracks,
not just in your bank reconciliations but across all the workflows in your financial close process.

The result? You can orchestrate the order of operations for financial reporting, reducing productivity redundancy. You also get visibility into the data you need to create mission-critical insight during the close period—not retrospectively, including the status of controls certification. 

Reconciling a high volume of transaction-level data involves a lot of tedious manual processes. This is typically a lose-lose for you and your business. As a finance and accounting expert, you’re most valuable to your business when dealing with anomalies, exceptions, and opportunities. 

But the more bogged down you are with manually matching all transactions regardless of their importance, the less time you have to focus on those exceptions and anomalies. And if you’re doing this from a spreadsheet base, you’ll be juggling v-lookups, index matches, and color coding when you should be focusing on high-value tasks. To allow you to be at your most valuable and make your job a lot less tedious, we developed Transaction Matching. 

It works a little like this. Using the connectors we mentioned earlier, we ingest your detailed data from your different sources (bank data from your bank file and GL data from your GL file). BlackLine then automatically matches these transactions, so when you log in, you only need to focus on the anomalies and exceptions. But we also know that there are a bunch of recurring exceptions with bank reconciliations that can become a point of frustration over time. For example:

• Bank fees that haven’t been posted to the general ledger
  

• Timing items like deposits in transit
  

• Outstanding checks
  
  

Beyond bank reconciliations, BlackLine gives you the ability to take logic and automatically identify repeat exceptions across all your financial close operations. You can even automatically record a journal entry for them (more on this in the next step). What is the impact of Transaction Matching? You can raise the bar for anomalies, letting you focus on the highest of the high-value exceptions. 

There are always going to be journal entries that are outside ‘business as usual.’ For example, say there’s an incorrect posting to a bank account in the general ledger, and you identify it as requiring adjustment. If executing that adjustment involves you leaving your platform or solution, that’s going to increase the time and strain it takes to handle each one and heighten the risk of posting an inaccurate adjustment.

To alleviate such lengthy platform workarounds, BlackLine Journal Entry allows you to:

• Identify individual transactions (or a group of them) when going through the unmatched transactions using Transaction Matching.
  

• Attach that to a journal entry or create a journal from it.
  

• Post it in the general  ledger account. 
  
  

This means you identified the adjustment in BlackLine, analyzed it, and cleared it directly from the unmatched transaction list without ever leaving the platform. It’s the kind of end-to-end transparency your teams need to make auditing more robust and your bank reconciliation workflows as waste-free as possible. 

Balance sheet substantiation is where you feel the cumulative impact of a unified solution. Gaining the confidence to substantiate the balance is a lot easier when you know you’re reducing the amount of manual handling errors entering your reconciliation in the first place. And when you have visibility over all the data you need, in one place. 

To help you gain this trust in your numbers, BlackLine Account Reconciliations allows you to drill down to the data without having to juggle a host of different systems. And that speed-to-detail goes right to the very end of the downstream side of things too. 

When you need to review supporting documentation or formal certifications, you’re able to view and share them with ease. Hit something you can’t substantiate? You’ve got a full list of explanations and the audit trail you need to understand how the handler came to this conclusion. Full traceability, full accountability. 

Transactions between legal entities occur frequently, especially in global businesses. Intercompany transactions are often thought of as left-pocket-right-pocket transactions, but they can drastically impact organizations if not handled properly. What happens if changes in currency rates arise or the timing is off?

Uh Oh. The balance is not zero.

Balancing intercompany transactions is a difficult yet not impossible task that teams face every month. Out of balances, disputes, exceptions, and more all need to be fixed before the month-end close is complete. That’s where BlackLine Intercompany comes to save the day.

With continuous monitoring and a global sub-ledger at the core, BlackLine Intercompany balances and helps resolve your most challenging intercompany disputes. Exceptions are flagged, and automated workflows get the information to the right people to make the right decisions. Once any adjustments are made, journal entries are automatically created to get your intercompany balances settlement ready.

For most businesses, the end-to-end account reconciliation process for a cash account is a key internal control. It allows businesses to validate that the cash on their balance sheet is accurate and to detect fraud.

The cumulative effect of using BlackLine is that you can continuously reconcile and substantiate your cash account balances. This will result in greater efficiencies and strengthen internal controls around cash. That’s because internal and external auditors have access to underlying supporting evidence and documentation. This reduces the manual resource burden of gathering evidence for an audit and means less time responding to requests.