BlackLine Stock

BlackLine, Inc. and its subsidiaries (BlackLine) provide 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, intercompany accounting, invoice-to-cash, and consolidation.

The company is a holding company and conducts its operations through its wholly-owned subsidiary, BlackLine Systems, Inc. ('BlackLine Systems').

On September 12, 2023, the company acquired Data Interconnect ('DI'), hereinafter referred to as the 'DI Acquisition'. DI is a cloud-based Invoice-to-Cash automation vendor within the electronic invoice presentment and payment ('EIPP') market. The primary purpose of the DI Acquisition was to enhance the company's existing accounts receivable automation solution by adding EIPP capabilities.

The company has created comprehensive cloud-based solutions designed to transform and modernize accounting and finance operations for midsize and enterprise organizations in all industries globally. The company's secure, scalable solutions transform critical processes, including financial close, intercompany accounting, invoice-to-cash, and consolidation. By introducing software that unifies critical data and enables process orchestration and automation, the company empowers accounting and finance professionals to improve the integrity of their financial reporting, reduce time spent on manual work, accelerate cash flows, and redeploy resources to focus on analysis and business partnership. With the recent acceleration of AI innovation and applications in the broader economy, the company expects to further explore and possibly leverage such new and innovative technologies for optimized workflow, efficiencies, and value creation for the company's customers.

The company is offering next-generation cloud-based solutions that address even more challenges for accounting and finance professionals by automating and streamlining accounting and finance operations in a manner that complements and supports traditional ERP systems.

The company's cloud-based solutions include Account Reconciliations, Transaction Matching, Task Management, Financial Reporting Analytics, Journal Entry, Variance Analysis, Consolidation Integrity Manager, Compliance, Smart Close for SAP, BlackLine Cash Application, Credit & Risk Management, Collections Management, Disputes & Deductions Management, Team & Task Management, AR Intelligence, Electronic Invoicing & Compliance, Intercompany Create, Intercompany Balance and Resolve, and Intercompany Net and Settle. These solutions are offered to customers as scalable solutions that support critical record-to-report and invoice-to-cash processes.

Growth Strategy

The company's principal growth strategies are to continue to innovate and expand the company's solutions; enhance its leadership position within the marketplace; extend the company's relationships with partners; and broaden the company's partnership with SAP through the SAP solution-extension ('SolEx') program, extend the company's technology integration capabilities with large ERP players, and maintain connectivity to other ERPs and third-party data sources.

BlackLine Solutions

The company provides powerful cloud-based solutions designed to unify, automate, and streamline accounting and finance operations. The key elements of the company's solutions include:

Comprehensive Platform

The company offers integrated suites of applications that deliver a broad range of capabilities to support critical accounting processes, such as financial close, intercompany accounting, invoice-to-cash, and consolidation.

The technology underpinning the company's software includes a comprehensive base of accounting and finance-specific business logic and rules engines.

Integration

The company provides simple, secure, and automated tools and integrations to transfer data to and from a range of enterprise-wide processes and systems, including ERPs, as well as many other sources of financial data from in-house applications and third-party providers. In addition, for companies with multiple systems and complex needs, the company can connect with any number of general ledger systems simultaneously, resolving many of the issues associated with consolidating data across systems.

Independence

The company's solutions are flexible and not dependent on any single operating system. They work with and complement most ERPs and other relevant financial systems the company's customers may use, enabling agility as organizations evolve and grow, whether organically or inorganically. The company's independence from other systems also means the company is able to focus on and innovate for the needs of the company's customers irrespective of updates or changes in its customers' businesses and other systems.

Ease of Use

The company's solutions are designed by accounting and finance professionals whose domain expertise and understanding of the company's customers' challenges contributes to its software's ease of use and customer experience. The company strives to enable any user to rapidly implement its software to manage their accounting and finance activities, from the simplest to the most sophisticated tasks. The company's user interface includes role-based dashboards and reports, provides clear visualization of accounting and finance data, enables user collaboration, and streamlines business processes.

Innovation

The company's ability to develop innovative solutions has been a key driver of its success and organic growth. Through a history and culture of thought leadership, the company created the next-generation of powerful software solutions that automate and streamline antiquated, manual accounting and finance processes to better meet the company's customers' diverse and rapidly changing needs. The company continues to focus on providing advanced solutions to other time and labor-intensive accounting and finance challenges.

Customers

The company's customers include multinational corporations, large enterprises, and midsize 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, 2023, the company had 386,814 individual users across 4,398 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.

Solutions and Services

The company's cloud-based solutions for the Office of the Chief Financial Officer 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. The company's solution offerings are consisted of multiple products and capabilities, including financial close, intercompany accounting, and invoice-to-cash. The company also provide resources and services for implementation.

Financial Close Management

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, the traditional way of closing the books is held together by manual processes and error-prone spreadsheets, increasing risk and threatening the accuracy of financial reporting. The company's Financial Close Management solutions allow customers to standardize and automate key steps across the record-to-report process to ensure accuracy, control, and timeliness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Consolidation Integrity Manager manages the automated system-to-system tie-out process that occurs during the consolidation phase of the financial close. Companies with multiple ERPs utilize a consolidation system to produce their consolidated financial results. Because these systems contain and produce information that changes continually and requires constant adjustments, a final tie-out that is typically handled manually in a spreadsheet is necessary prior to publishing results. This product automates the tie-out process, aggregating balances from dozens or hundreds of different systems and allowing users to identify exceptions and create adjustments quickly.

Compliance is an integrated solution that facilitates compliance-related initiatives, consolidates project management, and provides visibility over control self-assessments and testing.

Smart Close for SAP is a fully embedded, purpose-built solution to streamline and automate the close directly in SAP. 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.

Intercompany Financial Management

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 the company's 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. Invoices are automatically generated for each respective jurisdiction and e-invoicing capabilities can send intercompany data to country-specific portals.

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.

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.

Electronic Invoicing & Compliance 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. The company offers the following services:

Professional - With a focus on configuration over customization, the 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.

Training & Education - The company offers a variety of live and web-based training options through BlackLine University. Many customers consume their training through the company's 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 the company's platform like financial close, intercompany accounting, invoice-to-cash, and consolidations.

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 the company's 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.

Transformation - The company's transformation team assists with optimization strategies for transformation projects through the BlackLine Optimization Academy where the company teach 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 the company's consulting services or strategic customer advisory services to continue their journey.

Global Support - From the company's offices in Australia, Canada, England, 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 the company's 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.

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 and Microsoft; professional services firms, such as Deloitte and Ernst & Young; and business process outsourcers, such as Accenture and Genpact, to influence and drive customer growth. Since 2018, the company has partnered with SAP, incorporating them into the reseller channel that the company uses in the ordinary course of business. SAP has the ability to resell the company's solutions, as SolEx, for which the company receives a percentage of the revenues. SolEx allows the company to provide the highest level integration with SAP ERP solutions. Going forward, the company intends to become a more partner-powered organization, harnessing the deep and embedded relationships the company's partners have with key decision-makers at its customers.

The company's marketing efforts are focused on demand generation, establishing and extending the company's brand proposition, generating product awareness, and cultivating the company's community of users. The company generates demand primarily through word-of-mouth, search engine marketing, campaigns and events; and the company's 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.