Before Smart Close, Covestro faced significant challenges in their financial close processes. Manual activities such as opening accounts, initiating jobs, and tracking statuses in Excel were time-consuming and required teams to work overtime. The need for a more streamlined approach to these processes was evident, especially as accounting teams across different countries began to feel the impacts on their productivity and efficiency.

Recognizing the need for a comprehensive solution, Jane Clark, digital transformation partner at Covestro, chose BlackLine for its reputation as a leading financial close automation platform. BlackLine’s seamless integration with SAP provides a centralized interface, enhanced progress visibility, ownership, and accountability of financial close processes. Says Clark, “The fact that Smart Close is embedded in SAP does a lot for the user experience.”

Streamlined Financial Close Processes: Implementing Smart Close revolutionized Covestro's financial close operations, significantly reducing time spent on manual tasks and improving overall process efficiency. Covestro’s switch to Smart Close has enabled Continuous Accounting and real-time visibility throughout the end-to-end process.

“There were manual activities performed in each country. Opening accounts, starting jobs, asking for statuses, which is time consuming of course. We had to start eight in the morning and sometimes have a shift in the evening. With Smart Close, we run a lot of those big processes like product costing, asset management during the night, so when the accountant come there in the morning, everything has been done already,” say Clark.

Saved Time & Increased Productivity: Tasks such as product costing and asset management, once manually run during regular working hours, are now scheduled jobs automatically processed during off-peak times. Leveraging powerful job scheduling has allowed Covestro to reduce time spent on repetitive, manual work so they can prioritize timely review and analysis.