BlackLine, Inc. provides financial accounting close solutions delivered primarily as Software as a Service (SaaS). The company’s solutions enable its customers to address various aspects of their critical processes, including financial close and consolidation, intercompany accounting, and invoice-to-cash.
The company’s platform connects data and processes at their origin, enhancing financial reporting integrity, streamlining activities, and delivering faster insights. This approach drives immed...
BlackLine, Inc. provides financial accounting close solutions delivered primarily as Software as a Service (SaaS). The company’s solutions enable its customers to address various aspects of their critical processes, including financial close and consolidation, intercompany accounting, and invoice-to-cash.
The company’s platform connects data and processes at their origin, enhancing financial reporting integrity, streamlining activities, and delivering faster insights. This approach drives immediate impact and sustained value, maximizing cash flows, and accelerating the record-to-report and invoice-to-cash cycles.
BlackLine integrates with over 30 leading ERP systems, including SAP SE (SAP), Oracle Corporation, Microsoft Dynamics 365 (Microsoft Dynamics), an application offered by Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft), Sage Intacct, Inc., and NetSuite, Inc. It also connects with diverse financial data sources, such as banks, point-of-sale, treasury, payroll, procurement, and other systems, bringing data into unified workflows. This deep connectivity provides finance and accounting teams with accurate, actionable insights, reducing errors, improving compliance, and freeing time for strategic analysis.
The company’s cloud-based applications, increasingly powered by its BlackLine Studio360 Platform, include Account Reconciliations, Transaction Matching, Task Management, Financial Reporting Analytics, Journal Entry, Variance Analysis, Compliance, Smart Close for SAP SE, Cash Application, Credit & Risk Management, Collections Management, Disputes & Deductions Management, Team & Task Management, AR Intelligence, Electronic Invoicing & Payments, Intercompany Create, Intercompany Balance & Resolve, and Intercompany Net & Settle. These applications address many use cases across the company’s customers’ financial operations and include comprehensive and flexible solutions that deliver best practices for end-to-end record-to-report and invoice-to-cash processes.
Strategy
The key elements of the company’s strategy are to continue to innovate and expand its solutions; enhance its leadership position within the marketplace; and extend its relationships with partners.
The company intends to leverage its BlackLine Studio360 Platform to further extend its technology integration capabilities with large ERP players, and maintain connectivity to other ERPs and third-party data sources. The company has established the ability to buy BlackLine solutions via Cloud Marketplaces by Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure (Azure), and Amazon AWS (AWS). This enables the company’s customers to leverage their committed spend with those cloud providers for a software purchase with BlackLine.
BlackLine Platform, Products, and Capabilities
The company provides a unified, scalable, and flexible platform tailored to the evolving needs of the Office of the CFO and deliver purpose-built applications that address critical processes, including financial close & consolidation, intercompany accounting, and invoice-to-cash. The company’s software and services provide the critical technology and industry-leading practices that deliver accurate, efficient, and intelligent financial operations.
BlackLine Studio360 Platform
BlackLine’s recently launched Studio360 Platform addresses these challenges by providing an infrastructure and capabilities to further unify the company’s products and services that includes:
Studio360 Integrate: Powerful and flexible capabilities for unifying, cleansing, and transforming data through pre-built connectors and APIs, ensuring a single source of truth for finance and accounting teams;
Studio360 Orchestrate: The industry’s most extensive capabilities to map, optimize, and automate workflows across BlackLine applications, ERPs, and other applications like procurement, payroll, revenue, treasury, fixed assets, and more, with real-time progress tracking and event-based scheduling;
Studio360 Visualize: Real-time, AI-powered insights, anomaly detection, exception handling, and KPI monitoring through customizable dashboards and reports, enabling CFOs to make fast, data-driven decisions;
Studio360 Blueprint: An extensive library of proven process design templates grounded in customer-informed industry best practices, enabling rapid deployment and achievable transformation outcomes. BlackLine and its world’s-leading partners continuously contribute to and expand this library, ensuring it remains up-to-date and adaptable to evolving customer needs; and
Studio360 Control: A centralized hub for administering and enforcing financial data hierarchies, policies, and certifications to strengthen governance and risk management.
Solutions
The company’s cloud-based solutions for the Office of the CFO are designed to be the primary system of interaction for accounting and finance professionals. The company’s solutions unify systems and data and work to drive accuracy, collaboration, efficiency, and control. The company’s solutions enable accounting and finance professionals to execute their work continuously, empowering real-time insights and business partnership.
Products and Services
The company’s products consists of financial close & consolidation, intercompany accounting, and invoice-to-cash. The company also provides resources and services for implementation.
Financial Close and Consolidation
The collection of processes by which organizations reconcile, consolidate, and report their financial information at the end of each period is referred to as record-to-report. For organizations of any size, traditional processes are heavily manual and rely upon error-prone spreadsheets, increasing risk and threatening the accuracy of financial reporting. The company’s Financial Close & Consolidation solutions allow customers to standardize and automate key steps across the record-to-report process to ensure accuracy and control. The company’s products include:
Account Reconciliations provides a centralized workspace from which users can collaborate to substantiate their balance sheet by completing account reconciliations. Features include standardized templates, workflows for review and approval, linkage to policies and procedures, and integrated storage of supporting documentation. The product automates otherwise manual activities in the substantiation process, significantly reducing time and effort and increasing productivity. It also enhances internal controls by facilitating the appropriate segregation of duties, simplifying reconciliation audits and adding transparency and visibility to the reconciliation process;
Transaction Matching analyzes and reconciles high volumes of individual transactions from different sources of data based upon user-configured logic. The company’s rules engine automatically identifies exceptions, errors, missing data, and variances within large data sets. The matching engine processes millions of records per minute, can be used with any type of data, and allows customers to reconcile transactions in real time;
Journal Entry allows users to generate, review, and post manual journal entries. Many postings can be fully automated and calculated based on complex, customer-defined logic or automatically allocated across multiple business units. Validation and approval checkpoints help ensure the integrity of information passed to other financial applications, including hundreds of ERPs and subsystems, in a configurable, standardized format;
Task Management enables users to create and manage processes and task lists. The solution provides automatic and recurring task scheduling, includes configurable workflow, and provides a management console for accounting and finance activities. Though most commonly used with the financial close, users can create task lists and projects for hundreds of different use cases ranging from external audits to environmental impact surveys. The solution can be used as a cloud-based, controlled checklist that includes reporting and alerts to drive greater collaboration, accountability, and visibility;
Smart Close for SAP SE is a fully embedded, purpose-built solution to streamline and automate the close directly in SAP SE. Smart Close complements the company’s cloud financial close management solutions to achieve end-to-end automation. Purpose-built automation allows customers to automate task and job scheduling, verify the correctness of closing transactions, and take action, like raising alerts, making corrections, or pushing the closing process to the next step with job scheduling;
Financial Reporting Analytics is a modern solution that enables analysis and validation of group level or consolidated financial data with direct, real-time visibility into the local or underlying details. The solution provides a centralized workspace with end-to-end transparency and automates ledger-to-ledger, statutory-to-GAAP, tax-to-GAAP, and system-to-system reconciliation to ensure the completeness and accuracy of consolidated fluctuation results;
Variance Analysis automatically calculates, identifies, and provides anomalous fluctuations in balance sheet and income statement account balances with always-on monitoring. Once an item needing investigation is identified, users are automatically alerted so they can research and determine the source of the fluctuation. Users can then document and sign off on explanations, enabling stronger control; and
Compliance is an integrated solution that facilitates compliance-related initiatives, consolidates project management, and provides visibility over control self-assessments and testing.
Intercompany
Intercompany transactions occur when entities within a corporate parent organization transact with each other. These transactions are some of the most complex and frequent sources of uncertainty and process inefficiency for the controller organization, frequently causing imbalances that must be resolved. The intricate nature of intercompany transactions often drives accounting operations to process a substantial volume of intercompany charges within the constraints of the fiscal calendar, leaving insufficient time for enhancing the quality of the underlying data. This prevalent operational practice results in heightened stress for accounting and finance professionals, originating from an unproductive and avoidable workload. Often manual, time-consuming, and resource-intensive processes, intercompany transactions can have material impacts on costs if not managed properly. The company’s intercompany solutions manage the entire intercompany transaction lifecycle within our platform, from the initial creation of a transaction through the settlement. It is the only widely-available, automated end-to-end intercompany solution maintained in a single platform. These solutions include:
Intercompany Create increases visibility into transaction-level data by originating transactions directly within the company’s software. Intercompany transactions are configured and executed with a simple process that uses billing routes to facilitate the flow of a transaction and the appropriate tax and transfer pricing mark-ups. The application stores permissions and business logic exceptions by entity, service, and transaction type, ensuring that both the seller and the buyer of the intercompany transaction are authorized to conduct business, while billing in a manner that optimizes process efficiency and minimizes tax leakage. Transactions are booked via Journals directly into the ledger. Invoices are automatically generated for each respective jurisdiction and e-invoicing capabilities can send intercompany data to country-specific portals. Workflow capabilities exist for ad hoc transactions as well as non-invoiceable transactions;
Intercompany Balance & Resolve centralizes, streamlines, and automates intercompany reconciliation complexity and dispute management by capturing all intercompany transactions within the virtual subledger and providing resolution actions to reconcile. This feature reduces intercompany reconciliation risk, effort, and last-minute plugs by automatically flagging out-of-balance trading pairs and underlying transactions that create exceptions on a continuous basis. Open intercompany transactions are continuously analyzed to verify offsetting transactions on the respective trading partner books. Exceptions are flagged and users are automatically notified for investigation and resolution. Automated or workflow-based resolution actions and adjustments bring the balance back into line for settlement-ready balances; and
Intercompany Net and Settle enables real-time visibility into open intercompany transactions that integrate with treasury systems to facilitate and streamline netting, settlement, and clearing to optimize working capital. Using bilateral and multilateral netting to reduce the number of transactions that typically incur bank fees, treasury teams can effectively manage the manner that intercompany balances are closed out using cash and non-cash settlement methodologies to effectively manage the cash positions of each entity. Users can filter the information by transaction type, hold type, currency, or business relationship. This feature facilitates the process of netting transactions and helps users make informed, strategic decisions, while managing cash reporting and forecasting.
Invoice-to-Cash
Cash is vital to every business, and invoice-to-cash is central to improving cash flow. Managing invoice-to-cash well means maximizing working capital by collecting cash and minimizing credit losses. This critical process is often highly manual. The company’s unified suite helps customers collect cash, provide credit, and better understand cash flow.
Cash Application transforms the order-to-cash cycle by significantly reducing the time it takes to apply cash receipts to open invoices, resulting in significant reductions in unapplied cash. BlackLine Cash Application drives an automated and effective end-to-end process from an invoice-to-cash in the bank and fully applied in the subledger. It uses intelligent automation to help customers accurately apply payments to customers’ invoices in an ERP. Embedded machine learning then reduces the manual effort involved in the process and releases working capital for the company’s customers;
Credit & Risk Management brings customer and payment behavior data together to enable optimal risk strategies and real-time risk profiling. Managing the balance between sales and risk of non-payment is critical to profitability. Credit & Risk Management brings together data from numerous sources, such as credit reference agencies, credit insurers, and payment performance to understand historical indebtedness and behavior trends of the companies with whom the company’s customers work. This solution works in tandem with the company’s Collections Management solution to help organizations better understand their customer base and make informed decisions around collection strategies, recovery sequences, and the prioritization of team tasks;
Collections Management helps customers design collection strategies to fit each of their customer’s sales ledger profile. Releasing cash from customers is the fastest way to increase working capital. Collections Management streamlines the collections process and unlocks more cash from companies with automated escalating recovery sequences that enable collections teams to better prioritize their work by understanding which customers require attention. Customers gain real-time clarity into what actions and collection strategies are working at each stage of the collection process and can use this information to collect payments more efficiently, leading to reduced days sales outstanding and improved customer relationships;
Disputes & Deductions Management helps the company’s customers track payment disputes to drive prompt response and resolution. Unresolved disputes lead to uncollected revenue and can threaten profitability. Disputes & Deductions logs, monitors, and analyzes invoice disputes and provides the company’s customers automated workflows to accelerate dispute resolution and protect their customer relationships;
Team & Task Management automates accounts receivable teams’ tasks while ensuring timely execution by using data to drive priority of actions. The historically manual work behind accounts receivable processes can lead to siloed work and a lack of end-to-end visibility. Team & Task Management provides full visibility into the accounts receivable process, monitors critical actions against the volume of work, and allocates resources based on team capacity to prioritize risk management and cash collection;
AR Intelligence automatically processes, analyzes, and surfaces critical information, such as sales and payment performance data, customer payment trends, and days sales outstanding. This solution unifies the data across BlackLine’s Invoice-to-Cash suite to provide data typically difficult to obtain in real-time;
Customers using this solution gain insights into customer behavior, as well as the ability to measure the impact of extended payment terms to cash collections and cash flow, and understand the predictability of customer payments when building cash flow forecasts; and
Electronic Invoicing & Payments helps the company’s customers generate, send, and monitor invoices in diverse e-invoice formats through a multitude of delivery channels. Customers can download invoices through secure, branded, customer invoice portals. BlackLine’s Electronic Invoicing & Compliance can provide financial flexibility with the ability to service inbound customer payments through a range of versatile payment channels. BlackLine Invoicing & Compliance allows customers to adapt and adhere to country-specific requirements with evolving e-invoicing regulations across various countries.
Services
Customer service is essential to the company’s customers' success and it focuses on driving long-term partnership and value by offering the following services:
Implementation: With a focus on configuration over customization, the c company’s implementation approach favors rapid and efficient deployments led by accounting experts, rather than technical resources. A typical project will focus on mapping the company’s application to a customer’s current or ideal process, coaching them on best practices, and helping organizations become self-sufficient, instead of dependent on additional professional services. For customers that elect to work with a partner or business process outsourcer for implementation services, BlackLine provides partner training and certification, as well as support for partner-led projects;
Optimization: The company’s transformation team assists with optimization strategies for transformation projects through the BlackLine Optimization Academy where it teaches accountants how to optimize their accounting and reporting processes. Customers learn what processes can benefit from optimization and can choose to undertake the optimization process themselves or choose its consulting services or strategic customer advisory services to continue their journey;
Training & Education: The company offers a variety of live and web-based training options through BlackLine University. Many customers consume their training through its e-learning environment, while others select both live and e-learning. Courses cover solutions functionality, as well as the underlying concepts and demonstrate the power of our platform like financial close & consolidation, intercompany accounting, and invoice-to-cash;
Customer Success: The company’s customer success managers, many of whom are former users, provide customers with best practices and create a success plan for expanded usage of its platform for process optimization. A success plan is central to increased customer value and customer adoption. This approach positively impacts the company’s retention and upsell efforts; and
Global Support: From its offices in Australia, Canada, England, India, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and the U.S., the company provides tiered customer support, ranging from support provided during business hours to 24/7/365 support. All customers have access to essential support through its support and community portal, included as part of their subscription. In 2023, the company rolled out two additional tiers of support that customers can purchase based on their needs.
Across the company’s platform, products and services, BlackLine stands out through its integration, scalability and flexibility, ease of use, and commitment to innovation. The company’s solutions securely and automatically connect with ERPs and various financial data sources, simplifying data consolidation for complex environments. Unlike solutions tied to specific systems, BlackLine is ERP and data source agnostic, ensuring compatibility and adaptability as organizations evolve. Designed by finance and accounting professionals with years of industry experience, the company’s user-friendly interface offers intuitive dashboards, collaboration tools, and streamlined workflows for all skill levels. With a history of proven innovation and a commitment to continued investment, BlackLine continues to address more challenges across the Office of the CFO, meeting the diverse and dynamic needs of today’s businesses.
Customers
The company’s customers include multinational corporations, large enterprises, and mid-size companies across a broad array of industries. These businesses include publicly-listed entities and privately-owned enterprises, as well as non-profit entities. At December 31, 2024, the company had 397,477 individual users across 4,443 customers, exclusive of on-premise software. The company defines a customer as an entity with an active subscription agreement as of the measurement date. In situations where an organization has multiple subsidiaries or divisions, each entity that is invoiced as a separate entity is treated as a separate customer. However, where an existing customer requests its invoice be divided for the sole purpose of restructuring its internal billing arrangement without any incremental increase in revenue, such customer continues to be treated as a single customer.
Sales and Marketing
The company sells its solutions through its direct sales force. The company’s direct sales force leverages its relationships with technology vendors, such as SAP SE and Microsoft Corporation, professional services firms such as Accenture, Deloitte, and Ernst & Young and business process outsourcers, such as CapGemini, Genpact, and RSM, to influence and drive customer growth. Since 2018, the company has partnered with SAP SE, incorporating them into the reseller channel that it uses in the ordinary course of business. SAP SE has the ability to resell the company’s solutions as SAP SE solutions-extensions (SolEx), for which it receives a percentage of the revenues. SolEx allows the company to provide the highest level integration with SAP ERP solutions. Going forward, it intends to become a more partner-powered organization, harnessing the deep and embedded relationships its partners have with key decision-makers at its customers.
The company’s marketing efforts are focused on demand generation, establishing and extending its brand proposition, generating product awareness, and cultivating its community of users. The company generates demand primarily through word-of-mouth, search engine marketing, campaigns and events, and its network of business process outsourcers, business services organizations and resellers. The company leverages online and offline marketing channels on a global basis, organize customer roundtables and user conferences, and release white papers, case studies, blogs, and other resources. The company executes co-marketing activities with partners, such as SAP, Ernst & Young, and Deloitte. The company further extends its brand awareness through sponsorships with leading industry organizations such as the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, or AICPA, the Institute of Management Accountants, or IMA, the Financial Executives International, or FEI, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, or ICAEW, and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, or ACCA.
Intellectual Property and Proprietary Rights
The company has two patents.
History
BlackLine, Inc. was founded in 2001. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 2001.
