BlackLine
Modernizing Financial Automation Processes with BlackLine and SAP Technology

An average enterprise has multiple instances of SAP applications and technological advances are improving the rate at which companies adapt. Traditionally, companies used to spend years to implement SAP and customers were not interested in SaaS because they did not want anything hosted “outside the house.” Today, the sheer number of on-premise SAP implementations means that the ability to provide functionality that seamlessly works with SAP via a SaaS solution is highly optimal for SAP customers. The cloud-based BlackLine Financial Close Suite for SAP® Solutions is an SAP-endorsed business solution from BlackLine, the most experienced provider of enterprise software designed to automate and control the entire financial close process. “Because we are a SaaS provider for enhanced finance controls and automation, we are able to very quickly and nimbly fill the white space that SAP cannot,” says Therese Tucker, Founder and CEO, BlackLine.

BlackLine—an SAP Gold Partner—is a pioneer in finance controls and automation software, offering the first unified cloud platform—built from a single code base—that supports the entire close-to-disclose process. BlackLine increases business efficiency and visibility, while ensuring the highest degree of balance sheet integrity empowering users to gain full control over the financial close process by streamlining accounting workflows, resulting in timely financial and regulatory reporting, while ensuring accuracy and compliance auditability. “At BlackLine, our longstanding leadership position affords us a unique perspective on the way this market has developed,” remarks Therese.

According to Therese, most companies do all their work in spreadsheets that get emailed around, saved in shared drives, written over, lost, or out of date. Some companies have thousands of manual journals that need to be created and posted each month and those journals will have an approval procedure which can then be exposed to auditors. “In the current industry, the longer it takes to implement a software product, the more likely it is to be at risk. BlackLine simplifies implementation with an implementation wizard and helping our customers with project plans, streamlining the process,” notes Therese. In order to make it a really valuable procedure, it is imperative to check in later and make sure everything is working well for the customer. “We do a WhiteGlove service a few months after implementation which is more or less a fine tuning of the system. This is something very unique that we have not encountered anybody else

doing and it goes a long way in engendering customer satisfaction,” adds Therese.

BlackLine’s Finance Controls and Automation Platform meets the needs of all types of companies, no matter what size they are or where they operate in the world. One client, Dow Chemical, had an issue related to the lack of standardization between offices. Data was extracted from the SAP system and transferred to spreadsheets, with supporting documents stored on file servers or in file folders. After demoing account reconciliation software from several vendors, Dow chose the SAP-endorsed, SaaS-based Financial Close Suite for SAP® Solutions from BlackLine. This enabled Dow to easily standardize their accounts processes and manage a better workflow globally.

In the coming years, Therese plans to take the company into new waters and continue the astonishing growth they have been recording. “We are expanding geographically as well as into some other markets, but we never lose sight of the customer, who is the North Star,” concludes Therese.

The BlackLine Financial Close Suite for SAP® Solutions is an SAP-endorsed business solution that complements the core functionality of the enterprise application software leader