5 Q’s for Sumit Johar, Chief Information Officer of BlackLine – Center for Data Innovation

The Center for Data Innovation spoke with Sumit Johar, chief information officer of BlackLine, a Los Angeles-based software company that helps companies leverage financial data and automate manual accounting processes. Johar discussed how BlackLine is using AI to automatically match payments and how a new tool helps companies derive insights from several data sources in real-time.

Martin Makaryan: What is BlackLine’s mission?

Sumit Johar: In today’s dynamic business environment, financial teams and executives face unprecedented challenges: managing complex systems, siloed data, and increasing demands for real-time insights. Balancing timely, accurate reporting with strategic decision-making is critical. BlackLine helps companies address the challenge of closing financial books at the end of a quarter or a month, which involves complex reconciliations and journal entries. This process is traditionally manual and time-consuming, with finance teams working overtime using spreadsheets. BlackLine makes this process more efficient and easily auditable through automation. This is especially important for public companies, as their processes must be verifiable by third-party auditors. We provide software that helps companies centralize their data and automate journal entries and reconciliations, such as pulling and reconciling monthly cash statements from banks. Our cloud-based solution integrates with existing systems that enterprises have.

Makaryan: How does BlackLine automate financial processes?

Sumit: BlackLine’s software helps create workflows that link processes end-to-end, assisting financial teams with streamlining various tedious, administrative tasks, and ensuring those tasks are completed and certifiable. The software provides various solutions that reduce the time financial teams spend on transactions, accounting, and reporting. For example, BlackLine’s cash application solution uses AI to automatically apply a payment that a company received to customer invoices in a company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Another example of automation is transaction matching, which involves accounting teams downloading data from source systems, aggregating details in spreadsheets, and using complex formulas, v-lookups, or color coding to match and reconcile. Instead, BlackLine automates this process by aggregating the data in the cloud and applying business rules to automatically match transactions and flag exceptions. Lastly, automation not only reconciles transactions but also provides verifiable evidence for auditors, which is critical for finance teams.

Makaryan: How does BlackLine use generative AI?

Johar: BlackLine has been using AI for a while to automate processes and analyze data, but recently we have focused extensively on generative AI to enhance our software solutions. Generative AI allows us to tap into unstructured data, such as journal entries, and identify anomalies or patterns. This is especially helpful for risk management and automation, making tasks easier for our customers. Unstructured data in finance includes spreadsheets, contracts, and PDF documents. For example, reviewing a lengthy contract manually could take hours, but AI can assist in analyzing the document, identifying key terms, and supporting decision-making for the finance and accounting departments.

Makaryan: How can BlackLine help companies make data-driven decisions?

Johar: By automating many of the financial and accounting tasks that companies must do, we are enabling companies to boost productivity, but we are also providing solutions to streamline how companies access, analyze, and derive insights from financial data. We recently launched AR Intelligence, a tool that analyzes operational data in real-time, allowing companies to make data-driven decisions regarding credit limits, collection strategies, and risk policies​. A unified platform captures data across multiple regions, countries, banks, and ERPs, consolidating all relevant information into a single centralized location. Then, AR intelligence uses AI to analyze invoices and real-time data in the unified dashboard to provide valuable insights to companies.

Makaryan: What are you currently working on at BlackLine?

Johar: One of our strategic directions is to develop more innovative solutions that leverage AI to support our mission of streamlining finance and accounting operations through new technologies. Personally, I am currently working on improving operational efficiency for employees and enhancing customer support experiences. Specifically, we are working on AI assistants to help employees handle routine activities, such as managing approvals across multiple systems. This will give employees more time to focus on higher-value tasks.