Published on the 16/09/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Australia will be the springboard for a push into Asia by BlackLine Systems, a financial software company which has carved a niche by tackling jobs many companies traditionally managed using spreadsheets…
Blue chip enterprises such as Qantas, Optus, Coles, Bunnings, Linfox and the ABC are among the Australian organisations currently using BlackLine software, often to manage balance sheet account reconciliation, transaction management and payments consolidation needed when they close their books each month, quarter or year. According to founder and chief executive officer Therese Tucker who was in Australia this month for a user group meeting, the advent of tougher corporate regulations has seen large enterprises move away from the time consuming and error prone approach of managing account reconciliation with spreadsheets and search for more specialised tools.
It has been a boon for BlackLine which offers six modules in its Financial Close suite – with another two planned for release in November. The system currently offers account reconciliation, task management, transaction matching, journal entry, variance analysis and a consolidation integrity manager.
Tucker said that account reconciliation was not offered in ERP systems from the likes of SAP, JD Edwards or PeopleSoft, which had forced many organisations to load data from a series of ledgers into spreadsheets and then manually reconcile their balance sheet.
She said that while there was other transaction matching software in the market, BlackLine’s ability to integrate with existing enterprise software and perform the reconciliation in a cloud environment set it apart from the competition.
The system, which is sold as a service with data centres operating in the US and Europe, takes in data from enterprise systems and performs the required reconciliations. The “Basic Black” service costs $65 per user per month which the company claims is quickly recouped thanks to time saved and improved accuracy.
However at the moment it has plug-ins only for SAP and NetSuite platforms, though there are plans to expand this, initially with connectors for a range of Oracle software. The company also plans to use Australia – which Tucker says has grown strongly thanks to enterprise enthusiasm for SaaS solutions – as a springboard for a regional expansion.
She also has her sights on offering customers enhanced analytic tools to look for patterns in the data in order to use that to refine business decision making.
