BlackLine and DataBlend: Removing obstacles to financial transformation.

On the 14^th and 15^th of March I had the distinct pleasure of attending BeyondTheBlack London, BlackLine’s first major in-person event since pre-COVID. BeyondTheBlack is considered a premier conference for leaders and innovators across Finance and Accounting. BlackLine is a major partner of DataBlend’s, and we serve more than 400 customers together.

Apart from the simple joy of meeting and interacting with people in person again, it was educational to speak with prospective and current BlackLine customers, and many BlackLine partners.

The number one phrase I kept hearing: financial transformation. The office of finance loves BlackLine for a ton of reasons, but the overarching theme is a strategic one – they can materially change the way they do things, for the better, and spend more of their time adding value to the business (which is conveniently the more enjoyable work!)

I had a lot of productive conversations with BlackLine partners in particular about how DataBlend can assist this process for customers.  When you think about it, it seems a bit back to front to invest a great deal in your financial transformation programme, only to still spend hours per week shuffling downloaded data in a spreadsheet to get it into the right format for BlackLine!

A couple of examples:

Accelerating deployments. Plenty of customers have numerous different ERPs scattered around the world, and they map out a rollout for BlackLine that tends to be conservative, factoring in long periods of time to integrate different systems. Instead, DataBlend can offer a secure FTP environment for global subsidiaries to upload a downloaded TB to, without having to reformat the data first. DataBlend takes care of the transformation and sends the data to BlackLine.

• This removes 90% of the manual work the subsidiaries would have to do and makes it possible to get BlackLine into more hands, faster.
• And when the customer is ready, fully automated end to end integrations with DataBlend are rapid to deploy.

Removing timesinks. One of the surprises when you start working for an integration platform company is just how much time companies are spending reformatting spreadsheet data. One use case I’ve been discussing involves around 20 different files coming from different global payment processors – all in different formats. Rather than spending hours doing it manually, customers can drop them as-is into DataBlend’s secure FTP and let DataBlend transform and transmit the data into BlackLine.

• And all the time saved can be better directed into strategic change.

Most importantly, DataBlend can deliver these outcomes at a much lower TCO than other integration platforms on the market.

Ultimately, we’re not looking to make DataBlend the star of your financial transformation projects – what we do is remove all the data obstacles to those projects, at an investment that makes it a no-brainer for your customers.

Did you attend BeyondTheBlack in London? If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Reach out to me at arakich@datablend.com. If you’re a US-based BlackLine user, I’m also curious to know if you’ll be at the September conference in San Diego, CA. DataBlend is proud to be a Silver Sponsor of the North American BlackLine Conference.

About Adam Rakich

Adam Rakich joined DataBlend in December 2022 as Senior Director, Strategic Alliances, and is working closely with both DataBlend's partner base and new partners, with a focus on Europe. He has spent more than a decade working with the office of finance to, in various roles, automate their reporting, streamline their budgeting, accelerate their close, and enhance their core finance processes.