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Digital finance transformation leader BlackLine, Inc. 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 USD $40 to USD $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 harmonising 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 centre 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 organisations maximise tax reporting efficiency while enhancing regulatory compliance.

“Case studies show that our customers have reduced tax leakage by as much as USD $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.

A First in the Industry 

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, optimised for multi-ERP environments. The new functionality provides multinational organisations 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 organisations, 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 centralised 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 minimising intercompany transaction errors is critical for organisations 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.

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