BlackLine Announces Industry's First AI-Enabled Intercompany Accounting Capabilities

 Intercompany Predictive Guidance significantly reduces transaction failure rates, eliminates costly rework, and expedites processing across the transaction lifecycle

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 12, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading the industry in innovation once again, digital finance transformation leader BlackLine, Inc. (Nasdaq: BL) has announced the first AI-enabled intercompany accounting capabilities. Designed to prevent transaction failures before they occur and minimize time and resources spent across the entire transaction lifecycle, 'Intercompany Predictive Guidance' will be integrated into BlackLine's family of intercompany financial management solutions.

The first-of-its-kind functionality tackles the costly challenges associated with processing intercompany transactions – which often represent tens of millions of transactions each month and can have a value up to 10 times a company's reported revenue. These transactions frequently span geographical borders, currencies, and ERPs. Given their inherent complexity, compounded by data quality issues and omissions, intercompany transaction failures are an issue organizations simply cannot ignore. Failures result in billing, invoicing, reconciliation, and settlement delays while adding time, inefficiency, and frustration to an organization's intercompany operations.

BlackLine's Intercompany Predictive Guidance uses artificial intelligence, built upon a machine learning model, to analyze an organization's transactional data. The applied AI then predicts where issues are likely to arise and pose a risk to financial close processes and data accuracy – before the transactions are booked. It highlights high-risk transactions, explains risk factors, shows accounting teams where immediate corrections are possible, and provides guidance for future transactions. Using Intercompany Predictive Guidance, companies can dramatically reduce, or in some cases eliminate, their transaction failures, achieving significant time and cost savings. 

"I'm incredibly excited to be able to offer our intercompany customers this industry-first functionality," said BlackLine Founder and Co-CEO Therese Tucker. "Intercompany Predictive Guidance leverages the power of AI to help solve the real-life challenges these teams face daily, making them less reactive and freeing them up to focus on strategic work."

"Intercompany reconciliations overwhelm most accounting teams with their high volume, frequent data inconsistencies, significant administrative and manual work, long lead times, and stringent compliance and regulatory risks," added Don Ryan, chief strategy officer at HFS Research. "Using AI solutions like BlackLine's Intercompany Predictive Guidance to reduce error rates can save significant costs and enhance the reputation of companies of all sizes." 

Intercompany Predictive Guidance will initially be available for BlackLine's Intercompany Non-Trade solution, which manages and automates services-related transactions. The move is part of the company's strategy to offer unified, flexible, and comprehensive solutions that deliver substantial enterprise value for the office of the CFO.

BlackLine Intercompany Predictive Guidance is expected to be generally available in 2024. BlackLine is currently offering early adoption to interested customers. To learn more, please visit: https://www.blackline.com/solutions/intercompany-financial-management/non-trade/ 

About BlackLine
Companies come to BlackLine (Nasdaq: BL) because their traditional manual accounting processes are not sustainable. BlackLine's cloud-based financial operations management platform and market-leading customer service help companies move to modern accounting by unifying their data and processes, automating repetitive work, and driving accountability through visibility. BlackLine provides solutions to manage and automate financial close, accounts receivable, and intercompany accounting processes, helping large enterprises and midsize companies across all industries do accounting work better, faster, and with more control.

More than 4,200 customers trust BlackLine to help them close faster with complete and accurate results. The company is the pioneer of the cloud financial close market and recognized as the leader by customers at leading end-user review sites including G2 and TrustRadius. BlackLine is a global company with operations in Los Angeles, New York, the San Francisco Bay area, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney. For more information, please visit blackline.com.

BlackLine Forward-looking Statements
This release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "could," "expect," "plan," anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "predict," "intend," "potential," "would," "continue," "ongoing" or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. Forward-looking statements in this release include statements regarding our growth plans and opportunities.

Any forward-looking statements contained in this press release are based upon BlackLine's current plans, estimates and expectations, and are not a representation that such plans, estimates, or expectations will be achieved. Forward-looking statements are based on information available at the time those statements are made and/or management's good faith beliefs and assumptions as of that time with respect to future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties. If any of these risks or uncertainties materialize or if any assumptions prove incorrect, actual performance or results may differ materially from those expressed in or suggested by the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, risks related to the Company's ability to execute on its strategies, attract new customers, enter new geographies and develop, release and sell new features and solutions; and other risks and uncertainties described in the other filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time, including the risks described under the heading "Risk Factors" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K.  Additional information will also be set forth in our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q.

Forward-looking statements should not be read as a guarantee of future performance or results, and you should not place undue reliance on such statements. Except as required by law, we do not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise.

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SOURCE BlackLine