Financial software provider BlackLine Systems has established an alliance with U.S. audit, tax and advisory firm KPMG LLP through its Finance Governance and Technologies (FGT) practice. This will provide advisory services around clients’ implementation of BlackLine financial close solution in North America and Europe. KPMG will provide assistance with best practice, implementation and rollout methodologies. KPMG has more than 70 consultants globally who have successfully completed training in BlackLine.
“We see this alliance between BlackLine and KPMG to be a natural extension of the successful relationship we’ve experienced over the past several years. We’ve teamed with BlackLine on numerous implementation projects and have enabled our clients to realise the planned benefits by providing high quality resources,” Hakan Aytekin, partner, KPMG LLP, said. “We have also seen that, if implemented properly, technology solutions such as BlackLine can provide measurable value both with enhanced internal process controls, as well as efficiencies gained through the digitisation and automation around various accounting processes. Thanks to this alliance, we believe that companies that choose the BlackLine solution will enjoy the confidence of a comprehensive and customised deployment.”
Many large, and often times global, organizations have already benefited from working with BlackLine and KPMG.
“KPMG provided extremely valuable insight during the selection of an automated account reconciliation tool for a large manufacturing company client we serve at Xerox. The insights they provided helped bring clarity to the selection process and our client ended up choosing BlackLine,” Robb Kevers, account executive, Xerox, said. “KPMG then played a pivotal role in the implementation of BlackLine’s Account Reconciliation and Task Management modules with KPMG and BlackLine working closely with our internal resources by providing onsite support, additional training, quality assurance and guidance on best practices for configuring the software. The efficient work of both BlackLine and KPMG allowed our team to complete the project in a timely manner and their inherent knowledge across the board gave us the confidence that we had deployed BlackLine effectively for our client.”
“Zurich North America benefited tremendously from the KPMG and BlackLine Alliance – with BlackLine providing back-end technical expertise, while KPMG supplied onsite, day-to-day support implementing the software,” said Laura Darbro, vice president, Close Operations and General Accounting, Zurich North America. “The Zurich project was large and quite complex in scope, as we were implementing several BlackLine modules at once for a large number of users. Thanks to the quality, knowledge and highly skilled resources from KPMG and BlackLine, we began to see tangible benefits and notable ROI in less than a year.”
Under this alliance, KPMG will continue to provide its advisory and implementation services for account reconciliations, data matching, close cycle management and other related finance transformation projects and BlackLine will enable these efforts through its BlackLine Financial Close Software Suite solution.
“We rely on companies such as KPMG that have extensive experience in finance transformation to provide additional value to our clients,” Therese Tucker, CEO, BlackLine Systems, said. “KPMG has been a key partner, providing candid feedback on our software and suggesting enhancements to meet the needs of the large organizations they are serving. We’ve been honoured that KPMG has shown such a commitment to getting consultants trained to implement our software, but having a formal alliance in place takes our relationship to a much more strategic level.”
