Light & Wonder is the leader in cross-platform games and entertainment, with 6,000 employees across six continents. Since 2013, L&W’s finance and accounting team has been on a journey to streamline their global record-to-report processes with BlackLine.

With good progress optimizing a variety of closing tasks, Light & Wonder recognized a need to address remaining challenges. Leadership honed in on manual financial reporting and analytics that took excessive time, jeopardized accuracy, and diverted staff from more strategic tasks.

“Everything was manual, all in Excel,” says Jelcey Whitlock, Accounting Manager, Close Management & Reporting. “We had six people manually refreshing reports and doing drill-down to try to understand what caused a variance at a given location.” In addition, similar manual processes were performed by a separate global close and controls team that performed higher-level consolidated reporting.

BlackLine’s Financial Reporting Analytics solution was a natural fit that could build on Light & Wonder’s successes with other BlackLine solutions. Light & Wonder found Financial Reporting Analytics to be a game changer and purpose-built for their objectives—modernizing spreadsheet-heavy processes, such as analyzing balance sheets and income statements at line-item and consolidated levels.

Because BlackLine Financial Reporting Analytics integrates with BlackLine Variance Analysis which is used for local-entity and lower-level comparisons, Light & Wonder can now easily perform additional fluctuation analysis at the group level. With BlackLine assistance, Light & Wonder linked Financial Reporting Analytics with its ERPs and an existing consolidation system to “connect the data in ways we'd never been able to view before,” as Jeremiah Johnson, Director, Global Close & Controls, puts it. Leveraging mappings in other systems, L&W also eliminated the need for duplicate mappings and maintenance with Financial Reporting Analytics.

Faster reporting. Teams using Financial Reporting Analytics now deliver monthly financial reporting weeks faster after automating what had been manual data compilation and drill-down. “Since Financial Reporting Analytics, we’re saving two weeks of manual busy work after we’ve already closed the ledgers,” Whitlock says. “It’s an amazing time savings."

Improved close accuracy and quality. Light & Wonder finance teams support a more accurate and higher quality close because users have time to devote to more strategic tasks. They’ve also reduced top-side adjustments, both in volume and dollar amounts.

Enhanced visibility and stakeholder collaboration. Financial Reporting Analytics is helping Light & Wonder streamline manual review and approval processes involving email exchanges or shared files with preparers and management. Stakeholders now have better visibility that guides an optimized close.