Leading the industry in innovation once again, digital finance transformation leader BlackLine, Inc., has announced the first AI-enabled intercompany accounting capabilities. Designed to prevent transaction failures before they occur and minimize 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 first-of-its-kind 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. These transactions frequently span geographical borders, currencies, and ERPs. 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 organization’s intercompany operations.

BlackLine’s Intercompany Predictive Guidance uses artificial intelligence, built upon a machine learning model, to analyze an organization’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. It highlights high-risk transactions, xplains risk factors, shows accounting teams where immediate corrections are possible, and provides guidance for future transactions. Using Intercompany Predictive Guidance, companies can dramatically reduce, or in some cases eliminate, their transaction failures, achieving significant time and cost savings.