Accountants are becoming more critical than ever for businesses as automation frees them up from tedious manual tasks to become a true business partner, spearheading strategy and exploiting new revenue streams.

That’s the view of Tammy Coley, BlackLine’s chief transformation officer, and an industry thought leader on how technology intersects with finance and accounting operations. “Companies need so much more from accountants than just moving numbers around on a spreadsheet, especially in such challenging economic times,” she told Acuity on a recent visit to Sydney from her office in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Ditching Excel and embracing automation empowers accountants by removing manual, spreadsheet-based processes and allowing us to redirect our focus to the higher value-add role of the accounting function.”

Coley has seen first-hand how finance leaders become re-energised and more strategic when they’re no longer bogged down in endless routine work.

“Most accountants spend the majority of their time as after-the-fact reporters on how the numbers are stacking up, interpreting the data they’ve been given and advising how the company is doing,” she says. “Reporting accurate results is certainly important. However, partnering with the business to drive effective business decisions on the front end brings even greater value. When we’re heads down in spreadsheets, we might not even be aware that there’s an additional revenue stream or that a new process has been introduced.”

Pictured: Tammy Coley, BlackLine’s chief transformation officer

“Embracing automation empowers accountants by removing manual processes and allowing us to redirect our focus to the higher value-add role of the accounting function.”

Elevating accountants

Now, however, sophisticated accounting process optimisation software platforms are taking the role of accounting – from the CFO down to juniors in finance teams – to a whole new level. Today’s ‘numbers people’ are expected to not only close the books faster than ever before, but analyse vast swathes of data, navigate shifting global regulations and provide predictive insights. “It’s unleashing our potential, freeing us from our offices and letting us get out into the business to understand the operations and help the other executives make better and more informed decisions,” she declares.

It’s a transformation Coley understands from some personal experiences when she was executive director of accounting and internal controls governance at telecom giant Cox Communications in 2005.

“That year, the auditors weren’t too pleased with our reconciliations,” she remembers. “I was responsible for 21 locations and each of them was carrying out their accounting using Excel spreadsheets in the way they thought worked best. And of course, different locations had different ideas about what that was, so it could get pretty chaotic at times!”

After a failed attempt to standardise the spreadsheets, she spent hours playing around with Microsoft Access until she figured out a way to automate the reconciliation for one of their most cumbersome accounting processes.

“I thought, ‘Wow, this is pretty cool! I can do this for all our reconciliations – problem solved!’ But then it dawned on me that we had 20,000 accounts. It had taken me a fair old time to do just one of them.” Back to the drawing board.

Making Excel history

After doing some research for solutions, she stumbled upon BlackLine, a company formed five years earlier that promised it could make reliance on Excel a thing of the past. Still sceptical, she picked up the phone.

“It was amazing – from that very first conversation, I could tell they just wanted to help me. It felt like a partnership, that I had someone on my side to guide me through the changes that had to be made.”

But the call was set to become a much bigger deal than just finding a way to remediate a potential audit deficiency related to account reconciliations.

“The more we talked, the more I realised that there was so much more it could do to transform how we operated by eliminating wasteful processes at every level. Around 70% of accounting tasks can be automated. It’s not just the reconciliations, it’s the journal entries, roll-forwards, aging analyses and more.”

Twelve years after engaging BlackLine, she herself joined the company in 2017 and has been part of its extraordinary growth to annual revenue last year of US$523 million, and more than 1000 employees in 11 offices worldwide.

“The best part of my job is seeing the delight on the face of a new customer after BlackLine has successfully transformed their accounting operations,” she says. “I was speaking to a woman recently who used to spend three full days doing something that now takes under an hour! It means she can use her brain to offer more value to her company and focus on the accuracy of the results instead of expending considerable effort just to get it done. It’s like giving accountants superpowers!”

Overcoming fears

“I still speak to finance leaders who haven’t yet made the jump to automation and are overwhelmed by the idea of replacing age-old processes,” says Coley. “But our job is to take them on a journey, share our Transformation Framework and provide the comfort that BlackLine is the best partner for their success. I might say, ‘Share your hairiest, most time-consuming manual process. We’ll show you how to optimise it.’ We don’t just sell software and leave them to it; we have a library of proven accounting optimisation opportunities. We’re not starting with a blank slate – we make digital transformation a reality. “Often they come to us with one problem for us to solve, and we uncover others that they didn’t even know about.”

In the years she’s been visiting Australia, she’s seen incredible progress, but there are still too many ‘challengers to change’ holding on to the old ways. “As digitalisation ramps up, if you’re not on board and still reliant on Excel, you’re taking a big, unnecessary risk for your company and your career. You have to make the change!”

Find out more 

BlackLine’s cloud-based financial operations management platform helps over 4000 companies move to automated accounting by unifying data and processes. Visit blackline.com to learn more about the role of finance and accounting in navigating global instability and volatility