BlackLine unveils AI-enabled intercompany accounting

BlackLine, the digital finance transformation expert, has announced the industry's first AI-enabled intercompany accounting capabilities. 

'Intercompany Predictive Guidance' will be integrated into BlackLine's intercompany financial management solutions family. It is designed to prevent transaction failures before they occur and minimise time and resources spent across the entire transaction lifecycle. 

The functionality tackles the costly challenges associated with processing intercompany transactions, which BlackLine highlights 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, BlackLine insists that intercompany transaction failures are an issue organisations cannot ignore. Failures result in billing, invoicing, reconciliation, and settlement delays while adding time, inefficiency, and frustration to an organisation's intercompany operations.

BlackLine's Intercompany Predictive Guidance uses artificial intelligence, built upon a machine learning model, to analyse an organisation'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 may dramatically reduce, or in some cases eliminate, their transaction failures, achieving significant time and cost savings.  

Therese Tucker, Founder and Co-CEO of BlackLine, says: "I'm incredibly excited to be able to offer our intercompany customers this industry-first functionality."

"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 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.

Don Ryan, Chief Strategy Officer at HFS Research, says: "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."

"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." 

BlackLine's cloud-based financial operations management 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, accounts receivable, and intercompany accounting processes, helping large enterprises and midsize companies across all industries do accounting work better, faster, and with more control.

BlackLine is a global company in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco Bay, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney.