Partnership Improven - BlackLine

Improven is implementation and knowledge partner of BlackLine, a SAAS solution for robotising and making more efficient the (financial) closing and compliance processes such as smart close, reconciliation, complex matching and demonstrable in control.

Partnership Improven - BlackLine

To strengthen our proposition in the Record-to-Report market, BlackLine joined our Business Partner network from November 2018. BlackLine is the market leader and offers a SaaS solution that supports in simplifying and standardising financial closing and compliance processes. These include monthly closing with task management and smart close, automatic reconciliations and figure reviews, matching (bank, credit card etc) transactions, executing and controlling intercompany transactions, analysing fluctuations, generating journal entries and executing and providing insight into (internal) control activities (visibly in control). With BlackLine, we can ensure that our clients:

Control over the periodic closing process (week, month, quarter, year).
Work more efficiently by automating standard transactions and connections using business rules, thereby shifting the focus to the exceptions;
Creating end-to-end visibility with real-time dashboards and defined workflows
Being more in control with one version of the truth, reducing manual inputs and using automated control checks.
Complex matching, such as suspense accounts, bank statements but also credit card statements (usually a big challenge due to net statements).
Simply being visibly in control.

With BlackLine, we are taking the first concrete steps into the world of robotisation in financial processes. We have been exploring this for several months and have also looked at other propositions. BlackLine stands out from competitors particularly because of the breadth of the solution, which contributes to its market leadership. They serve very nice organisations, but there is also a lot of potential. This is partly why we chose this partnership. In addition, the number of partners is and will be limited.

Synergy

BlackLine is a software company and is booming globally, including in Europe. To keep up with its growth, BlackLine works with business partners. BlackLine's implementations are often large in size, complex in nature and require substantive knowledge of Finance, IT and Risk. Change management also plays an important role in this type of project. Let this be exactly what we at Improven are good at. In this way BlackLine can focus on product development and Improven takes care of implementation and change management.

InTheBlack London 2019

A nice touch to our partnership was that we (Louis, Jan (vd Belt) and Lorentz) attended InTheBlack London on 13 and 14 March at BlackLine's invitation. Prior to this conference, we were given the opportunity to give an Improven presentation to the European Sales Team on 12 March. In it, we covered Improven's added value, presented our vision and best practices on internal control and concluded with a customer case (demo) from Dufry. The presentation was well received and the audience was clearly impressed ("this is the best presentation we have seen on the compliance product"). The VP Sales Europe gave a call-to-action to the Nordics sales managers and directors present to involve Improven in his or her project as early as possible. We put Improven nicely on the map at BlackLine!

The two days that followed were dominated by the InTheBlack conference. Deloitte and EY shared recent and expected developments within the finance function. After these presentations, things became more substantive and the latest releases, roadmap and best practices around BlackLine were presented. This year, among other things, we can expect more capabilities around integration with ERP and consolidation systems from BlackLine, and machine learning capabilities are on the roadmap.

The most valuable part of this congress of course was getting in touch with (potential) clients of BlackLine. For example, we had nice conversations with Belvar (Marriot and Moxy hotels under licence in UK, NL, Germany among others). This is how we found out that they are in the process of implementing BlackLine, which is struggling to get off the ground. Nice concrete lead for us!
This Friday, we will follow this up and sit down with BlackLine Sales to identify existing accounts and potential leads. We will also be looking at opportunities within the Dutch government and municipalities in the field of Internal Control. All in all, a very valuable excursion to London.

Assignments

After entering into the partnership in November 2018, we immediately started an implementation at CitizenM. We are currently in phase 1, implementing Account Reconciliations, Task Management, Variance Analysis and the Compliance module. We will go live in Q2, after which phase 2 will start. This phase will focus on the implementation of Journal Entry, Intercompany and transaction matching module. In addition, we have recently built a PoC for Dufry and will start implementation in the near future. Finally, we presented our experience at CitizenM to The Student Hotel. To fill the current demand, 5 Improven consultants are currently in the process of officially certifying for BlackLine. Some of us are already certified.

More information

If interested or have any questions, contact Louis de Koning (louis.de.koning@improven.nl), Jan Bosman (jan.bosman@improven.nl) or Lorentz Perdon (lorentz.perdon@improven.nl)