BlackLine wants to be the financial controllers’ process orchestrator

Financial controllers are under a lot of pressure today, battling market volatility, mitigating the ongoing talent crunch, and enduring limited access to capital. Finance leaders have the daunting task of doing even more with less while finding ways to help the organization grow in a harsh macroeconomic climate. Accounting automation SaaS platform BlackLine is taking up the mantle to help finance leaders, particularly controllers, orchestrate their response. The company is charting a broader vision of operational financial management and starting to deliver on it with the upcoming release of its Accounting Studio solution.

Financial operations management—a bigger platter on which to serve the office of the CEO

BlackLine is arguably best known as a financial close platform. In our research, finance leaders have frequently mentioned how critical technology has become in helping them streamline processes and minimize errors during month-end and quarter-end closing activities. Over the last few years, organic expansion and acquisitional growth have helped the company move closer to its renewed vision of being indispensable for controllers throughout the accounting calendar, not just at period-end.

BlackLine now targets an end-to-end operational management scope, spanning accounting operations, control, and compliance, process optimization, and balance substantiation (see Exhibit 1). This evolves the company from being a closing-oriented record-to-report (R2R) function toward becoming a hub for finance process orchestration.

Exhibit 1: BlackLine aims its category expansion at becoming an indispensable financial operations management platform for the controller

Source: BlackLine, 2023

BlackLine delivers a unified view of accounting processes to enable orchestration and automation

Building out capabilities across the financial operations management landscape won’t be a cakewalk for the R2R platform. BlackLine has a pragmatic approach, focusing on the common friction points it has already successfully solved around manual error reduction and automation. The new approach will provide a unified view of accounting processes and the ability to orchestrate and automate them across BlackLine modules and ERPs.

Its acquisitions have helped it reach new functional territories, including accounts receivables and intercompany accounting. When introduced later this year, the Accounting Studio will visualize processes, automate them, and track their status in real-time.

BlackLine’s Accounting Studio is gearing up to help you undertake some serious silo busting

The Accounting Studio starts to answer the “how” of executing its financial operations management vision, getting at the heart of finance transformation challenges such as disparate systems, disparate data, and the resulting lack of real visibility into operations. The Studio manages end-to-end process mapping and visualization, understanding dependencies, reporting in real-time, and unifying several applications to create a space for heightened collaboration between the various domains within client enterprises. BlackLine’s goal for the Accounting studio is well aligned with HFS’ OneOffice tenets.

Blackline’s focus areas for Accounting Studio are in line with market needs. Our recent research surveying 207 finance leaders shows that most (around 64%) expect to focus on greater automation, real-time insights, better data infrastructure, and cloud-based platforms in the next two years to deliver more data and insight-driven finance operations.

Exhibit 2: The two-year timeline to data-driven finance will demand more support from orchestration platforms

Sample: 207 F&A executives across global 2000 enterprises
Source: HFS Research, 2022

The Bottom Line: Controllers need greater visibility, data and insight sharing, and process orchestration to deliver on the promise of OneOffice.

BlackLine is starting its Accounting Studio solution journey by bringing best practices from the accounting close process, learned from working with more than 4,000 clients. Not every client will be able to engage with the company on its newest solution, but by focusing on one of the biggest bottlenecks of finance transformation, disparate systems, and data, BlackLine is at least putting forward an approachable way controllers can access the data, visibility, and process orchestration they will need to meet HFS OneOffice goals.