Strategic alliance to offer financial process automation and intercompany solutions to make enterprise finance organizations more effective

Deloitte announces its strategic alliance with BlackLine, Inc. (Nasdaq: BL), a leader in financial corporate performance management enabling continuous accounting. The alliance enhances Deloitte’s Digital ControllershipTM offering, which helps organizations govern and automate financial accounting processes.

“When financial systems and reporting processes are ineffective or disjointed, the issues are twofold,” said Kyle Cheney, Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory partner, Deloitte &Touche LLP. “First, back-end manual processes and detective controls require brute force by controllers and chief accounting officers who often are challenged to find creative ways to mitigate the risk of errors in financial reporting. Second, intercompany transactions suffer inefficiency that drives the cost of finance up while talent is sub-optimized. Both reporting errors and inefficiency can result in major challenges for chief financial officers, as well as tremendous cost to the organization and its shareholders.”

Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory CEO Chuck Saia said, “Board members and C-suite executives expect every function to develop and share deeper insights that help drive strategic growth. Transforming the financial function with enhanced efficiencies that leverage governance and risk management technologies can help our clients’ leaders in controllership, risk, and finance focus on higher-level strategy efforts.”

According to a 2016 Deloitte poll, just 9.2 percent of respondents say their organizations have holistic, efficient, and well-communicated intercompany accounting frameworks. With an automated finance platform and processes that allow consistent and visible intercompany transactions, organizations can realize greater efficiencies, mitigate risks, and leverage data previously unattainable to improve strategic and financial performance.

“Our strategic alliance with Deloitte is highly valued and complementary. Together, we will continue to help our clients automate and accelerate complex financial close processes–increasing operational efficiencies, while streamlining compliance and improving governance,” said Therese Tucker, CEO and founder, BlackLine. “We are also enabling finance organizations to become strategic advisors to the business by freeing accountants from manual, repetitive tasks and unleashing them to handle higher-level, value-added activities.”

The alliance brings together Deloitte’s advanced finance automation solutions with BlackLine’s Finance Controls & Automation and Intercompany solutions. The basis for the strategic alliance is helping corporate controllers and finance organizations reduce inefficiencies and errors. It also furthers efficient management of compliance programs and provides insights that positively impact business performance and strategy.

For more information on how Deloitte enables chief accounting officers, controllers and their teams to build world-class controllership capabilities, visit Deloitte’s Center for Controllership™.