BlackLine Sets New Standard with Addition of Trade Management Capabilities to its Intercompany Financial Management Solutions

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Nov 29, 2023, 09:01 ET

An industry first, BlackLine Intercompany now addresses both trade and non-trade transactions, maximizing tax defensibility and increasing regulatory compliance

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 29, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital finance transformation leader BlackLine, Inc. (Nasdaq: BL) continues to solve complex intercompany accounting challenges, delivering new trade management capabilities for enterprise and midsize customers.

Intercompany is one of the most complex areas of finance, with audit and tax advisory firm Grant Thornton estimating intercompany transfers at 30 to 40 percent of the global economy or $40 to $60 trillion annually. For large enterprises, transactions can have a value of up to 10 times a company's reported revenue. Lack of visibility over vital transactional details - such as price, quantity, and legal entity information - results in issues downstream, such as closing delays, tax filing challenges, increased talent turnover, and potential write-offs and restatements.

BlackLine Intercompany solves these problems by harmonizing and unifying data across multiple ERPs, reducing tax filing time and effort and overall close cycles. As global regulatory issues, such as global minimum taxes and e-invoicing take center stage, BlackLine Intercompany provides a line of sight into all transactions, helping to ensure correct taxes are applied across entities and geographies for both the buyer and seller. To date, BlackLine Intercompany has helped numerous Fortune 100 organizations maximize tax reporting efficiency while enhancing regulatory compliance.

"Case studies show that our customers have reduced tax leakage by as much as $500 million and direct taxes by up to 25%, with some cutting their overall close cycle in half," said Kivanc Pakel, head of intercompany operations at BlackLine.

This new product enhancement makes BlackLine Intercompany the first and only solution to handle both trade (goods sold as part of a company's usual line of business) and non-trade (services such as allocations, chargebacks, BPO and shared services center billing) transactions, optimized for multi-ERP environments. The new functionality provides multinational organizations with greater tax defensibility and improved transfer pricing policy adherence.

"BlackLine's first-of-its-kind functionality tackles the costly challenges associated with processing intercompany transactions in larger organizations, which can represent tens of millions of monthly transactions," said Robert Kugel, executive director at ISG-Ventana Research. "BlackLine is once again bringing industry-first technology and expertise to complex intercompany operations to enable companies to manage this complex business process proactively and effectively."

Customers benefit from a range of new functionality, including:

Increased interdepartmental collaboration via centralized data and workflow
Increased transfer pricing visibility through billing route configurations
Enhanced tax defensibility via validation of sales orders and invoices
Informed, proactive decision-making through exception reporting

"As one of the top causes of financial restatements, addressing and minimizing intercompany transaction errors is critical for organizations to ensure a sound control environment," added Pakel. "The benefits for businesses are clear – less time reconciling which enables a faster close; fewer write-offs for increased profitability; less talent turnover; and improved transfer pricing policy adherence and tax defensibility for regulatory compliance."

The new trade management capabilities are included in BlackLine's Intercompany Create solution, part of its portfolio of Intercompany Financial Management offerings. Go here to learn more about how BlackLine can help solve your intercompany issues.

About BlackLine
Companies come to BlackLine (Nasdaq: BL) because their traditional manual accounting and finance processes are not sustainable. BlackLine's market-leading cloud platform and 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 and consolidation, accounts receivable, and intercompany accounting processes – inspiring, powering, and guiding large enterprises and midsize businesses on their digital finance transformation journeys.

More than 4,300 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 is recognized as the leader by customers at leading end-user review sites including G2 and TrustRadius. BlackLine is a global company with operations in major business centers including Los Angeles, New York, the San Francisco Bay area, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney. For more information, visit blackline.com.

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SOURCE BlackLine