Atlantic Union Bank, Creditsafe, Dentsu, Flowers Bakeries And FWD Insurance Honored With 2021 Modern Accounting Awards From BlackLine

Leading midsize and enterprise organizations from around the world and across multiple industries recognized for embracing modern accounting to drive transformational outcomes

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 26, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Accounting automation software leader BlackLine, Inc. (Nasdaq: BL) has announced the winners of its 2021 Modern Accounting Awards. The company's third annual global awards program recognizes customers that have achieved transformational outcomes by going beyond traditional manual accounting processes to embrace modern accounting. The 2021 winners - spanning multiple industries and regions - demonstrate excellence in using BlackLine's market-leading solutions for financial close, intercompany accounting and accounts receivable (AR) automation and join notable past award recipients including Domino's, McKesson, SiriusXM and Zurich North America.

This year, BlackLine honored customers in six categories:

• The Unifier – For the company that has overcome the challenges inherent in a complex finance technology landscape by unifying data, processes and visibility to deliver accurate results faster.
• The award goes to Dentsu International, a marketing, media and digital communications company, whose transformative vision to integrate and unify their global agency network through simplified and standardized systems and processes using BlackLine across 60 countries with over 1,000 entities and more than 50 different enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) drove tremendous results including achieving 80% auto-certification of hundreds of thousands of account reconciliations and seamlessly completing fully virtual BlackLine deployments for 64 of the entities since the global pandemic hit.

• The Accelerator – For the company that has automated routine accounting work to save time and refocus finance professionals on strategic business initiatives, revolutionizing finance and accounting (F&A) use cases with process design and automation.
• The award goes to FWD Insurance, a multinational insurance company, for embracing enhanced capabilities to load massive amounts of data into BlackLine, ultimately matching over a million previously manual line items automatically and freeing up team resources for an impending migration to Oracle ERP Cloud.

• The Closer – For the company that embraces continuous accounting, distributing close tasks across the period to reduce month-end workloads, speeding up the close process and supporting the business in real time.
• The award goes to Flowers Bakeries LLC, a subsidiary of Flowers Foods, one of the largest producers of packaged bakery foods in the United States – including such brands as Nature's Own, Dave's Killer Bread, Wonder, Canyon Bakehouse and Tastykake – for using the entire suite of BlackLine solutions to reduce month-end bank reconciliations from up to 15 days in the past to just two days.

• The Modernizer – For the company that embraces modern accounting, moving from traditional chaotic processes to building a proactive, predictable and fast F&A function.  
• The award goes to Atlantic Union Bank, a premier financial services provider to the mid-Atlantic region, for adopting a culture of continuous improvement, embracing the value of technology to improve systems and processes, and seamlessly moving its F&A teams to remote work at the start of the global pandemic – resulting in an increase in auto-certification of account reconciliations from 41% to 71% and significantly reducing duplicative data entry.

• The Capitalizer – For the company that consistently unlocks working capital held hostage in their debtors and that has gone on to achieve operational excellence by unifying data and processes all with the deployment of AR automation.
• The award goes to Creditsafe, a global provider of business credit reports, for achieving an 85% to 95% multi-currency matching rate, allowing the AR team to focus on debt collection using clean, accurate and up-to-date sales ledgers and also for standardizing processes across countries using BlackLine's unified platform for AR automation.

• The Transformer – For the company that brings a special focus to successful change management, transforming F&A operations with a bold vision across people, process and technology.
• The award goes to a global industrial manufacturing giant for embracing the power of BlackLine to improve a broad range of business processes.
  

"We're honored to recognize these customers that are setting the standard for true modern accounting and defining digital finance transformation," said BlackLine CEO Marc Huffman. "Each of the winners has made incredible strides optimizing and automating critical processes in their finance and accounting organizations so they can deliver strategic value to the business."

Entries were evaluated and winners selected by a team of BlackLine digital finance transformation experts. Award winners will be celebrated on the (virtual) main stage at BlackLine's annual global user conference BeyondTheBlack 2021 and also will share their transformation stories in featured breakout sessions.

For 13 years, BeyondTheBlack™ has brought together a global community focused on innovation in Finance & Accounting. BeyondTheBlack 2021 will take place virtually Tuesday to Thursday, Nov. 16^th to 18^th, featuring more than 100 speakers spanning 80 sessions. Join us to find out why Eventex recognized BeyondTheBlack 2020 as one of the most 'innovative, creative and effective events in the world'. For information or to register free of charge, go here.

About BlackLine
Companies come to BlackLine (Nasdaq: BL) because their traditional manual accounting processes are not sustainable. BlackLine's cloud-based solutions and market-leading 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.

Nearly 3,600 customers trust BlackLine to help them close faster with complete and accurate results. The company is the pioneer of the cloud financial close market and recognized as the leader by customers at leading end-user review sites including Gartner Peer Insights, G2 and TrustRadius. Based in Los Angeles, BlackLine also has regional headquarters in London, Singapore and Sydney. For more information, please visit blackline.com.

SOURCE BlackLine