BlackLine’s platform consists of nine cloud-based applications, including Account Reconciliations, Cash Application, Compliance, Consolidation Integrity Manager, Intercompany Hub, Journal Entry, Task Management, Transaction Matching, and Variance Analysis. These sell as scalable solutions that support critical accounting processes.

BlackLine’s solutions primarily empower companies to practice continuous accounting. Businesses have traditionally used batch processing for financial closes, taking “batches” of different data sources and processing them all at once at the end of a period. This method is error-prone, giving companies outdated data while consuming vast manpower with tedious and labor-intensive tasks.

Continuous accounting enables companies to reconcile data in real time throughout a time period continuously. This gives companies updated data on sales and expenses and divvies out the tasks of recording these numbers throughout a period, making an end-of-period push to process these figures unnecessary.

One of the keys to BlackLine’s success is its platform neutrality and agnosticism. Its solutions integrate with more than 30 enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, including Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), Netsuite, SAP (NYSE: SAP), and Workday (NASDAQ: WDAY), as well as bank accounts, sub-ledgers, and in-house databases. For companies with multiple systems and complex needs, BlackLine can connect with any number of general ledger systems simultaneously, resolving many of the issues associated with consolidating data across systems. These systems don’t mind building bridges to BlackLine because they see the company as not a competitor, but a partner with a complementary product.

BlackLine leans into these relationships to build additional sales channels (it’s no coincidence that new CEO Huffman came from Netsuite, one of BlackLine’s partnering ERPs). In the 2020 second-quarter conference call, Huffman said these relationships were what drove growth in the pandemic’s early days:

At the start of the pandemic, we focused our sales efforts first on our customer success, leveraging our partner ecosystem and our large and experienced account management and customer success teams. Their strong relationships, combined with BlackLine’s leadership position, helped us drive growth within our existing customer base in Q2.

BlackLine’s partnership with SAP has proven to be especially fruitful. In Q2, approximately 25% of BlackLine’s revenue resulted from this partnership, and BlackLine was awarded SAP’s Pinnacle Partner of the Year for 2021.