Continuous accounting thanks to automation and AI

Modern ERP and business intelligence systems reduce the predominantly manual effort involved in financial closing processes. Manual activities are an enormous time burden for companies, as one literally can no longer see "the forest for the trees" when working through tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of entries to check the accounts for completeness and correctness. The enormous workload and the high time pressure in financial closing lead to a high risk of error in today's still predominantly manual work steps.

End-to-end record-to-report process

This is where the partnership between SAP and BlackLine comes into play: BlackLine's automation solutions close the gap between ERP and reporting systems between orchestration and consolidation. This eliminates the need for time-consuming coordination processes, often in the form of emails or phone calls, and data consistency is maintained with full transparency throughout the entire closing process.

And there are further advantages: BlackLine's automation solutions make it possible to distribute tasks that usually accumulate at the end of the month over the entire accounting period. This principle is known as continuous accounting. It ensures that the closing process no longer extends over a few days at the end of the month, but that the individual tasks can be completed successively through automation. The result: bottlenecks and stress situations are significantly reduced and, perhaps even more importantly, the financial data is always up to date, which makes forecasts or business decisions more reliable at all times.

Intelligent account reconciliations

If one considers, for example, the laborious reconciliation process of different accounts, the advantages become clear. The solution is able to perform these reconciliations on an algorithm basis, so that the accountant ultimately only has to clarify the transactions that the system cannot perform automatically. However, since BlackLine's automation solutions have a machine learning principle, they learn after each exception: The algorithm learns on the basis of the (still) manual assignments, so that the degree of automation increases continuously and the risk of human error decreases.

Thanks to this technology, the validity of complex balances derived from hundreds of thousands of individual entries from a wide variety of data sources can be proven. This is the only way that automation solutions can match millions of transactions within a few seconds. To manually reconcile such a volume of data in the same amount of time would exceed the reasonable time and staffing limits for such a project. And there would still be the risk of data quality.

Live Accounting - always the right numbers at hand

Live Accounting gives the closing process unprecedented transparency, and a company's finance department can always make valid statements and offer resilient evaluations. This also enables CFOs for the first time to answer detailed questions during the closing process. The central, largely automated and, above all, end-to-end process forms the basis for Accounting 4.0, in which precise figures are available at all times and the business can be readjusted if necessary - regardless of the size and complexity of the company.

The joint solution from SAP and BlackLine thus sets new standards in terms of transparency, validity and speed of financial statements. For the first time, companies can perform a far-reaching soft close at any time. The precision and timeliness of these figures are the basis for better planning or corrections - a flexibility that is an immense competitive advantage in times of dynamic markets.

Close the Gap: the automation solutions from BlackLine

BlackLine's automation solutions complement SAP ERP Financials by streamlining and automating core tasks such as account substantiation, manual journal entries, or reconciling high-volume transactions in seconds rather than days. This improves the financial close and enables more complete and meaningful data to be reported at any time.

BlackLine's automation solutions provide maximum transparency, efficiency, simplification and auditability for the financial close process.

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