New York — No matter how much a technology firm spends on the development of a new piece of software, nowhere is innovation arguably more likely to take root than inside a customer account — and no one department has proven to be more ripe for innovation than finance.
Or so says Therese Tucker, CEO of BlackLine, an accounting software firm that first rolled out an account reconciliation software offering in 2005 and has expanded its finance and accounting toehold to more than $60 million in annual revenues.
“If you have good software and your customer has a need, they’ll find all kinds of crazy ways to utilize it,” says Tucker, whose firm has continued to keep a close eye on how its customers use and leverage its offerings.
“We’ve always paid close attention to how our software has grown within different customers, and our intent is to sort of take that ownership back and classify that usage under a particular solution category, where we can then offer it up to other customers,” notes Tucker, whose firm recently coined the mantra “modern finance” to help distinguish and advance its ever-evolving vision of finance automation.
According to Tucker, growth for the firm has been traditionally rooted in so-called “loose ends,” or those accounting approaches that have remained dependent on manual processes, such as the necessary clearing of intercompany transactions, the monitoring of internal controls to address compliance risks, and the processes leading to a more accurate period-end close.
“We actually have never really focused on up-selling to current clients, so if they’ve wanted something, they’ve just bought it — so this was really organic growth,” adds Tucker, whose firm is on track to log its eighth consecutive year of 50 percent growth.
Besides enjoying robust sales, BlackLine is now seeing the market that it addresses recognized as a stand-alone category of financial management applications — Enhanced Finance Controls and Automation. The new category, designated last August by technology analyst firm Gartner Inc., is now helping to distinguish the specific capabilities of BlackLine’s offerings from those performed by ERP systems.
“It was almost as if our market wasn’t a legitimate market because people didn’t want to recognize that there were gaps within ERP systems),” explains Tucker, who says that there are still more gaps to fill when you consider the current state of intercompany processes.
“Many companies just don’t know where their transfer pricing agreements are. They will have six different ways of completing an intercompany transaction. If they have more than one general ledger, they often have different people booking manual journals that may or may not correspond with each other,” she explains, while highlighting the demand for one of BlackLine’s newer offerings known as the Intercompany Hub. Carefully packaged and inventoried under the newly minted “Enhanced Finance Controls” header, Intercompany Hub is designed to centrally interface with all of a customer’s core ERP systems, collecting and distributing intercompany transactional data.
Says Tucker: “I think that sort of calling this out as a legitimate market will open up the possibilities of we can do, and I do think of it as a turning point.”
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