BlackLine said it has announced the first AI-enabled intercompany accounting capabilities.
Designed to prevent transaction failures before they occur and minimise time and resources spent across the entire transaction lifecycle, ‘intercompany predictive guidance’ will be integrated into BlackLine’s family of intercompany financial management solutions, the firm noted.
The AI-enabled intercompany accounting functionality tackles the costly challenges associated with processing intercompany transactions, which often represent tens of millions of transactions each month and can have a value up to 10 times a company’s reported revenue, BlackLine said.
These transactions frequently span geographical borders, currencies, and ERPs, the firm pointed out, adding that given their inherent complexity, compounded by data quality issues and omissions, intercompany transaction failures are an issue organizations simply cannot ignore.
Failures result in billing, invoicing, reconciliation, and settlement delays while adding time, inefficiency, and frustration to an organisation’s intercompany operations, BlackLine note.
According to the firm, its intercompany predictive guidance uses AI, built upon a machine learning model, to analyse an organisation’s transactional data.
The applied AI then predicts where issues are likely to arise and pose a risk to financial close processes and data accuracy — before the transactions are booked, BlackLine said.
It highlights high-risk transactions, explains risk factors, shows accounting teams where immediate corrections are possible, and provides guidance for future transactions, the firm added.
Using intercompany predictive guidance, companies can dramatically reduce, or in some cases eliminate, their transaction failures, achieving significant time and cost savings, the firm noted.
Intercompany predictive guidance will initially be available for BlackLine’s Intercompany Non-Trade solution, which manages and automates services-related transactions, the firm added.
