BlackLine, a Los-Angeles-based financial controls and automation software provider, has updated its Finance Controls and Automation Platform with new features to improve functionality for SAP ERP clients, as well as reporting and navigation improvements designed to better enable continuous accounting and minimise the traditional month-end crunch.
“For our customers running on SAP ERP, we are now providing an end-to-end open item clearing solution. We believe an account reconciliation solution for SAP ERP without this capability would be incomplete,” said Therese Tucker, CEO, BlackLine.
The BlackLine Financial Close Suite for SAP Solutions provides an optimised connector for SAP ERP. This feature enables users to automatically clear open items in SAP ERP, automating the analysis, reconciliation and clearing of open transaction items. Since this may amount to millions of open items, the feature saves time and increases accuracy. Without it, according to BlackLine, the massive manual process of analysing the information can lead to transactions being written off or left open.
“We believe this has transformational benefits and will become the norm,” said Dr Christoph Ernst, senior director, finance solutions, SAP, explaining that the new solution complements the functionality inherent in SAP ERP. “Using BlackLine alongside SAP ERP helps reduce risk by replacing manual, error-prone processes with a secure end-to-end process.”
The update also provides an enhanced reporting framework and navigation menu bar. The new reporting framework enables customers to access large amounts of data instantly and to quickly generate custom reports from right within their application screen. The navigation tool features updated styling and an intuitively organised menu plus improved system search capabilities.
BlackLine is planning additional graphical interface enhancements over the next year in an effort to continue to improve the user experience.