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Revelwood Named BlackLine’s 2025 Solution Provider Partner of the Year – Americas

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Revelwood has been named BlackLine’s 2025 Solution Provider Partner of the Year – Americas, a recognition that reflects our team’s unwavering commitment to client success and finance transformation. Awarded as part of BlackLine’s annual Global and Regional Partner Awards program, this honor celebrates firms that have demonstrated exceptional dedication to customer success, innovation, and transformative growth in the Office of Finance.

What This Award Means

BlackLine’s partner ecosystem brings together industry-leading consulting, technology, and outsourcing firms committed to transforming finance and accounting operations. The 2025 Partner Award winners are recognized for their deep expertise, strong collaboration, and commitment to setting new standards of excellence in finance transformation.

Being named Solution Provider Partner of the Year for the Americas reflects our team’s relentless focus on delivering measurable outcomes for our clients — helping them automate financial close processes, enhance controls, and gain real-time visibility into their financial operations.

A Partnership Built on Excellence

Michael Otto, SVP of Global Alliances & Channels at BlackLine, captured the spirit of this year’s awards: “This year’s winners set the bar for what’s possible when expertise meets collaboration. Their expertise is instrumental in unlocking AI-enabled finance transformation for our mutual customers, helping them not only solve today’s challenges, but also prepare for the future of finance.”

Dino Daddona, Vice President of Sales – Americas at Revelwood, shared his perspective on the recognition: “We are incredibly honored to be named BlackLine’s 2025 Solution Provider Partner of the Year for the Americas. This recognition is a direct reflection of our team’s relentless dedication to our clients’ success. Together with BlackLine, we are empowering the Office of the CFO to embrace automation, unlock real-time insights, and navigate the future of finance with absolute confidence.”

How Revelwood Delivers Value Through BlackLine

As a long-trusted BlackLine implementation partner, Revelwood brings deep platform expertise and a team of highly trained consultants to every engagement. We help finance organizations:

  • Close and consolidate financial statements with greater speed and accuracy
  • Automate financial close and accounting processes to reduce manual effort
  • Plan, monitor, and analyze business performance in real time
  • Achieve measurable business outcomes through best-in-class implementation and ongoing support

Looking Ahead

This award is both a recognition of what we’ve accomplished and a motivator for what comes next. As the Office of the CFO continues to evolve — with AI, automation, and real-time data playing increasingly central roles — Revelwood remains committed to helping our clients stay ahead of the curve.

We are deeply grateful to our clients for their trust and partnership, and to the entire Revelwood team whose dedication makes achievements like this possible. Together with BlackLine, we look forward to continuing to drive transformative change for the Office of Finance.

Revelwood is a BlackLine Gold Solution Provider whose team of former accountants and financial systems professionals brings real-world expertise to every engagement. We help companies streamline, automate, and modernize time-consuming accounting processes — delivering lasting impact across the Office of Finance.

Want to learn more? Read the full press release here.

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Why AR Automation is Finance’s Next Big Win

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In today’s finance environment, “doing more with less” is no longer enough. The real challenge isn’t just efficiency — it’s productivity. For finance and accounting leaders, this means removing entire manual steps, not just speeding them up. According to a new research perspective from Ventana Research (now ISG), accounts receivable (AR) automation is one of the fastest ways to boost productivity, accelerate the close, and build financial resilience.

Why AR Automation Matters Now

Manual AR processes create friction across the invoice-to-cash cycle. Missed handoffs, delayed approvals and error-prone spreadsheets not only slow down collections, but also push out the financial close. In fact, Ventana Research found that:

  • 88% of organizations that automate nearly all their close processes finish within six business days.
  • By comparison, only 40% of organizations with little or no automation can close that quickly.

Automation isn’t just about speed — it’s about control. Automated workflows provide visibility, enforce consistency, and reduce the risk of errors that lead to rework and delayed reporting.

The Continuous Accounting Advantage

AR automation is a core component of what Ventana calls continuous accounting — a modern finance approach built on three pillars:

  1. 1. End-to-end digital automation to eliminate manual work and improve data quality.
  2. 2. Evenly distributed workloads across the accounting calendar to avoid period-end bottlenecks.
  3. 3. Continuous improvement to refine processes and maximize technology investments.

When AR is automated, teams can focus on higher-value work: improving customer relationships, accelerating collections, and providing more accurate cash flow forecasts.

From Faster Cash to Stronger Customer Relationships

AR automation doesn’t just help finance — it helps the business. By accelerating cash application and reducing days sales outstanding (DSO), companies free up working capital and strengthen liquidity. And with better visibility into payment behaviors, finance teams can take a proactive, customer-friendly approach to collections.

Instead of waiting for invoices to age out, AR teams can reach out early and positively: “Did we do something wrong?” This simple shift strengthens customer relationships while reducing disputes and delays.

AR Automation Accelerates the Close

Automation is no longer optional — it’s the foundation for a faster, smarter close. By reducing manual work, improving control and removing frictions in the invoice-to-cash cycle, AR automation delivers:

  • Faster closes with fewer errors
  • Improved cash flow and reduced financing costs
  • Better operational intelligence for finance leaders
  • Stronger customer relationships
  • A more engaged, productive finance team

If your organization is still relying on spreadsheets and manual handoffs, now is the time to act. Practical, affordable AR automation solutions can help finance teams work smarter, close faster, and play a more strategic role in the business.

Get the full research and see why leading finance teams are automating AR.

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Streamline Reconciliations With BlackLine’s Out-of-the-Box Templates

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Finance teams face growing pressure to close the books faster while improving accuracy and compliance. Unfortunately, manual, spreadsheet-driven reconciliations remain one of the most common bottlenecks. BlackLine’s Reconciliation Templates are designed to change that.

These prebuilt templates provide a best-practice approach to ensuring the accuracy, quality and completeness of account reconciliations — right out of the box. Whether you’re reconciling cash, accruals or suspense accounts, BlackLine helps automate the process and bring consistency to every close.

Why Reconciliation Templates Matter

BlackLine’s templates allow finance teams to:

  • Standardize processes across multiple account types
  • Automate repetitive tasks to reduce manual effort and errors
  • Improve visibility and compliance with clear audit trails
  • Scale with your business by adapting to evolving needs

By leveraging these templates, organizations can transform reconciliations from a reactive, manual chore into a proactive, controlled and automated process.

Key Reconciliation Templates

Here’s how BlackLine simplifies some of the most common reconciliation types:

  • Accruable Items: Track and reconcile items expensed now but paid later, such as property taxes or services.
  • Schedule List: Summarize multiple accrual schedules with custom views for bonus accruals, fixed assets, and reserves.
  • Amortizable: Automate schedules for prepaid expenses or deferred revenue, including daily partial amortization.
  • Associated Accounts: Compare IFRS to GAAP balances or regulatory to statutory accounts for accuracy and compliance.
  • Bank Account: Reconcile cash accounts with automated imports and bank auto-certification rules.
  • Validate key accounts like allowance for doubtful accounts or accrued payroll with calculation-driven reconciliations.
  • General List: Handle flexible reconciliations for inventory, petty cash, prepaid expenses, or retained earnings.
  • Subledger Match: Align subledger data for accounts receivable, accounts payable, or fixed assets with the general ledger.
  • Suspense: Monitor and control high-risk suspense accounts with aging and business justification tracking.

Built-in Controls for Greater Efficiency

BlackLine’s templates include powerful features such as ERP drill-down, integrated spreadsheets, and related account linking. These controls enable finance teams to work smarter, reduce risk, and accelerate the close—without sacrificing accuracy.

Want to see these templates in practice? Explore our BlackLine Reconciliation Templates YouTube playlist for step-by-step videos that walk through each template and show you how to maximize efficiency.

By leveraging BlackLine’s Reconciliation Templates, organizations can move away from error-prone manual reconciliations and embrace a standardized, automated approach. The result? Faster closes, stronger controls, and more time for finance to focus on strategic priorities.

Ready to modernize your reconciliations?

Download the full white paper to see how BlackLine’s Reconciliation Templates can help your team close with confidence.

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It’s Time to Rethink Journal Entries in Your Financial Close

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For all the buzz around finance transformation, one critical process has been left behind: journal entries. Despite massive efforts to modernize the close, many finance teams are still stuck in spreadsheets, emails and late-night manual entries. The result? Delayed closes, increased risk and exhausted teams.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The Hidden Opportunity in Journal Entries

Journal entries are the foundation of financial reporting. They feed the general ledger and directly impact the timeliness and accuracy of actuals—data that downstream teams rely on for forecasting, planning and decision-making. Yet, journal entry processes remain some of the most manual and error-prone activities in accounting.

Manual journal entries not only slow the close — they introduce risk, inflate costs and pull valuable resources away from strategic work. According to EY, automation could eliminate over 70% of journal entries while cutting days off the close cycle.

A Smarter, Safer, Faster Way Forward

Automating journal entries doesn’t mean replacing judgment — it means reducing repetitive, rules-based tasks that don’t add value. With the right solution, accounting teams can automatically extract data, apply allocation rules, validate entries and post to the ERP — all with a full audit trail and proper controls in place.

This new approach enables:

  • Speed to accurate results – Close faster with fewer errors
  • Speed to financial insights – Analyze trends and discrepancies earlier
  • Speed to strategic insights – Enable agile forecasting and real-time decisions

Making Automation Real: Start with Repeatable Tasks

The best place to begin? Recurring entries like T&E accruals, allocations and intercompany transactions. These processes follow clear rules and are prime candidates for touchless automation.

Leading organizations are adopting continuous accounting — spreading journal activities across the period instead of cramming everything into month-end. This shift frees teams to focus on what matters: analysis, not administration.

BlackLine Makes it Possible

BlackLine’s Journal Entry solution is designed to help accounting teams automate, standardize and streamline their processes — without relying on IT. With prebuilt templates, built-in controls and real-time ERP integration, BlackLine delivers:

  • Centralized journal creation, review and approval
  • Real-time data validation and posting
  • Seamless collaboration and audit-readiness

Transform the Close – Elevate Accounting.

Automating journal entries is more than a process upgrade — it’s a mindset shift. It’s about giving finance teams the tools and time they need to become true business partners. And it starts with eliminating the manual work that holds them back.

Ready to stop surviving the close and start mastering it?

Download the white paper to learn how to get started with journal entry automation.

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Unlock Trapped Cash: AR Automation is the Controller’s New Power Move

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For today’s controllers, balancing the books is only the beginning. You’re no longer just a steward of financial accuracy — you’re a chief value extractor, charged with improving working capital, accelerating cash flow and driving digital transformation across the finance function.

And there’s one area where this transformation is overdue: accounts receivable (AR).

Too much cash is tied up in debtors, reporting is siloed and slow and finance teams spend more time reconciling than strategizing. But AR automation is changing all of that by turning the AR function into a driver of cash, confidence, and competitive advantage.

Here’s why it’s become a top priority for controllers.

1. Unlock trapped cash

According to PwC, $1.5 trillion is trapped on balance sheets worldwide. AR automation helps release that cash faster by streamlining collections, improving match rates and reducing days sales outstanding (DSO). More cash in the bank means fewer costly borrowing needs and greater flexibility for investment.

2. Gain cashflow visibility

Knowing when you’ll get paid is as important as knowing that you’ll get paid. AR automation provides real-time data on payment behaviors, enabling controllers to forecast cash flow with confidence, coordinate with treasury, and avoid surprises.

3. Strengthen shareholder confidence

Liquidity, gearing and return on capital employed are under the microscope. By reducing debtors and improving working capital, controllers can demonstrate financial health and reinforce trust with investors — even in uncertain markets.

4. Turn data into decisions

Manual reporting can’t keep up with today’s pace of business. With AR automation, controllers gain instant access to actionable intelligence — from customer payment trends to AR team performance metrics. This enables faster, smarter decisions that deliver measurable results.

5. Improve cost efficiency

AR automation isn’t just about cutting headcount — it’s about cutting waste. By eliminating low-value manual tasks, controllers can redirect resources toward higher-value work, reducing the cost of finance while increasing its impact.

6. Scale without adding headcount

When companies grow, bad processes scale with them. AR automation fixes the process, not just the staffing gap, but delivering capacity, improving morale and avoiding costly FTE additions.

7. Deliver value beyond finance

AR automation doesn’t just transform AR. It unites finance, credit and commercial teams around a single, real-time view of cash flow and collections. The result? Better decisions, fewer disputes, and a stronger, healthier business.

AR automation is no longer optional. It’s a strategic lever that helps controllers free up cash, strengthen financial health, and become a true driver of business value.

Now is the time to move from reconciling yesterday’s numbers to shaping tomorrow’s results.

Discover how AR automation can transform your office of the controller. Download the white paper to learn why AR is important to the Office of the Controller.

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How to Eliminate Manual Matching and Speed Up Your Month-End Close

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High-volume reconciliations are the bane of the accounting team’s month-end close. From bank-to-GL reconciliations to intercompany transactions, matching the mountains of data manually wastes hours — and introduces costly errors.

If your team is still relying on Excel “rainbow spreadsheets” and repetitive ticking and tying, it’s time to rethink your process.

BlackLine’s Transaction Matching solution automates detail-heavy reconciliations so your team can shift focus from number crunching to exception handling — and finally reclaim hours from your close calendar.

The Hidden Cost of Manual Reconciliation

Many accounting teams are stuck in a cycle of inefficiency. Matching bank files to GL entries, reconciling suspense accounts, or tracking intercompany AR/AP is often a manual process involving spreadsheets, color-coding and burned-out staff.

Not only is this time-consuming, it also delays critical analysis and problem-solving. Instead of resolving exceptions before month-end, teams are buried in the mechanics of reconciliation —ironically, the very task that’s supposed to identify exceptions.

Automating the Match: How BlackLine Makes it Happen

BlackLine Transaction Matching transforms this process with a matching engine that automatically compares millions of records in minutes. Here’s how it works:

  • Data files from banks, ERPs, and other sources are imported automatically.
  • Smart matching rules are defined by the user—based on fields like dollar amount, check number, or date.
  • The matching engine does the heavy lifting, identifying matches and surfacing only the exceptions.

The result? Your team stops chasing numbers and starts solving problems.

Real-world Results: 13 Hours Saved Every Month

One restaurant group with 150 locations used BlackLine to automate 99% of their GL detail matching and 96% of cash-to-GL matching — saving the team 13 hours each month.

A vacation rental marketplace uses it to reconcile over a million low-dollar, high-volume transactions each month, including taxes and merchant fees.

Zendesk cut its month-end close by two days, while an academic health science center saved 14 hours monthly and gained real-time visibility into unreconciled accounts.

Where Transaction Matching delivers the most value

BlackLine’s solution shines in a wide range of reconciliation scenarios, including:

  • Bank, credit card, and cash accounts
  • Intercompany transactions
  • Suspense and clearing accounts
  • Timecard and contractor invoice reconciliation
  • Travel, gift card, and warranty claim matching
  • Accruals, commissions, and unclaimed property

With flexible rule creation and continuous matching capabilities, teams can move away from the end-of-month scramble and toward a more controlled, efficient close.

A better close is possible

By automating reconciliation with BlackLine Transaction Matching, finance teams gain:

  • Speed: Match millions of transactions in minutes
  • Efficiency: Spend time on exceptions, not routine matching
  • Visibility: See progress and issues in real time
  • Control: Set rules, track outcomes, and manage with confidence

The bottom line? You don’t have to choose between speed and accuracy. With automation, you can have both — and give your team the time and clarity they need to focus on what matters most.

Learn how BlackLine helps teams match millions of transactions in minutes. Download Automating High Volume Transactions.

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Modernizing Financial Close: Automation, Accuracy, and Agility

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The financial close process is a mission-critical function for finance and accounting teams. Yet, for many organizations, it remains a bottleneck filled with manual tasks, reconciliation errors and time-consuming workflows. To stay competitive in today’s fast-paced business environment, finance leaders must embrace automation, connected thinking, and strategic transformation in their record-to-report (R2R) processes.

The Power of Accuracy in Financial Close

Financial data accuracy is the foundation of confident decision-making. Without it, businesses risk making strategic errors based on flawed insights. Two key areas that finance teams must address to enhance accuracy include:

  1. 1. Journal Entry Management
    • Errors in journal entries are a leading cause of inaccuracies in financial reporting.
    • Manual processes create bottlenecks, making audits more challenging.
    • Solution: Centralizing and automating journal entry creation, validation, and posting ensures compliance and efficiency.
  2. 2. Automated Reconciliations
    • According to PwC, 30% of accounting teams’ time is spent on manual reconciliations.
    • Traditional reconciliation methods—spreadsheet-heavy and labor-intensive—are prone to errors.
    • Solution: Automating reconciliation workflows helps unify data, match transactions, and flag exceptions in real time, significantly reducing errors and improving efficiency.

Beyond Quick Wins: Long-Term Transformation

While automation offers immediate benefits, organizations must think beyond short-term improvements. A successful finance transformation requires:

  • A holistic approach to financial processes: Instead of treating journal entries and reconciliations as isolated tasks, organizations should integrate them within an end-to-end accounting framework.
  • Incremental improvements to upstream data quality: Poor data entering the system creates problems down the line. Cleaning data at the source prevents recurring issues.

Scaling Financial Close Success Across the Enterprise

Many organizations begin their finance transformation journey with the financial close process. However, the most forward-thinking finance leaders recognize the need to extend automation and efficiency to other areas, including:

  • Invoice-to-Cash: Streamlining billing and collections to accelerate cash flow.
  • Intercompany Transactions: Reducing complexity in global financial operations.
  • Monthly Accruals: Connecting journal entries, reconciliations, variance analysis, and controls certification.

By expanding automation across these areas, organizations can create a finance function that is more agile, accurate, and strategically aligned with business goals.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls in Finance Automation

When selecting a financial close solution, organizations must avoid these common mistakes:

  1. 1. Moving inefficient processes to the cloud without rethinking workflows. Simply transferring spreadsheets into a cloud-based system doesn’t solve inefficiencies—it just shifts them.
  2. 2. Thinking too small. Choosing a solution based on short-term needs rather than long-term goals leads to fragmented processes.
  3. 3. Underestimating integration needs. A financial close solution must integrate seamlessly with an organization’s ERP and data sources to deliver full value.
  4. 4. Relying on partners who overpromise. Finance teams should work with solution providers that offer true automation and scalability.

The Future of Financial Close: A Unified Approach

The financial close process is evolving, and organizations that adopt a connected, automated and strategic approach will gain a competitive edge. By leveraging intelligent solutions that integrate seamlessly into broader financial operations, finance leaders can drive efficiency, reduce risk and transform the role of finance from a back-office function to a strategic powerhouse.

Learn more about unifying your financial close. Download the eBook Five Steps to Building a Growth-Ready Financial Data Foundation.

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Are You 7 Metrics Away from Future-Ready Financial Operations?

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Finance leaders know that a stable, scalable and efficient financial close process is critical to long-term success. Yet, many organizations continue to struggle with slow, manual workflows that delay financial reporting, create unnecessary risk, and hinder strategic decision-making.

But what if you could measure and benchmark your financial operations to assess your “future-readiness?”

The latest industry benchmark guide from BlackLine explores seven key metrics that define a modern, resilient financial close process. Here are the critical areas that could be standing in the way of your finance transformation.

1. Hours Spent Cleaning and Downloading Data

Industry Benchmark: 2-8 Hours Setup

Data preparation is often one of the biggest hidden inefficiencies in financial operations. Manually downloading, importing and structuring data for reconciliation and reporting eats up valuable time and introduces unnecessary risk.

Future-Ready Solution: Organizations leveraging automation solutions can integrate data directly, reducing setup time to as little as two hours. This ensures real-time visibility and reduces the burden on accounting teams.

2. Percentage of Transactions Automatically Reconciled

Industry Benchmark: 99% Auto-Reconciled

Manually matching transactions is not just time-consuming—it’s also a morale killer for finance teams. A low percentage of automation in reconciliation means that skilled professionals are stuck on repetitive tasks instead of focusing on exceptions and anomalies.

Future-Ready Solution: With automated transaction matching, companies can achieve reconciliation accuracy rates of 99%, freeing up teams to focus on strategic financial analysis.

3. Percentage of Manual Journal Entries Per Month

Industry Benchmark: 10% or Fewer

Scalability will be a challenge if your organization is still processing a high volume of manual journal entries. Manual processing increases errors, compliance risks, and inefficiencies.

Future-Ready Solution: Automating journal entry creation and validation allows leading organizations to reduce manual journal entries to 10% or less. 

4. Percentage of Low-Value Journal Entries

Industry Benchmark: Less than 5%

Low-value journal entries (such as transactions below a certain threshold) can consume significant resources without providing much benefit. Understanding their impact allows organizations to optimize processing efforts.

Future-Ready Solution: Using AI-powered analysis, finance leaders can set materiality thresholds and identify unnecessary journal entries, allowing teams to focus on higher-value activities.

5. Percentage of Automated Recurring Journal Entries

Industry Benchmark: 35% Automation

Recurring journal entries—such as accruals and amortization—are predictable and should not require extensive manual intervention. Yet, many organizations still rely on outdated processes that require accountants to manually re-enter the same data every month.

Future-Ready Solution: Automating recurring journal entries eliminates redundant work and increases accuracy, leading to greater efficiency in month-end close.

6. Hours Spent Responding to Audit Requests

Industry Benchmark: Less than 2 Hours

Audit season shouldn’t bring financial close operations to a halt. But for many teams, responding to audit requests is an inefficient, time-consuming process that involves tracking down documents across multiple systems.

Future-Ready Solution: Centralizing audit documentation in an automated financial operations platform allows for self-service auditing, cutting response times to under two hours.

7. Number of Solutions Needed to Execute Financial Close

The more fragmented your financial close process, the harder it is to maintain consistency and accuracy. Relying on multiple disconnected tools increases operational risk and reduces efficiency.

Industry benchmark: Leading organizations aim for a unified financial close platform rather than relying on multiple disconnected systems.

Future-Ready Solution: A unified platform consolidates financial close processes, reducing complexity and improving transparency.

Is Your Finance Team Future-Ready?

By benchmarking your financial operations against these seven key metrics, you can identify opportunities for improvement and take steps toward a more agile and resilient finance function.

Want to see how your organization stacks up? Download the full eBook to learn how BlackLine customers have achieved best-in-class financial close automation and efficiency.

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