When the Incorta Analytics Data Hub for Finance solution launched a few months ago, we set out on a mission to create the world’s most powerful end-to-end and self-service data hub for financial and operational analytics.
Today, we are rapidly expanding the solution to meet the extraordinary demand we are seeing in the market, as well as support even more use cases in the office of the CFO. Better yet, we are working hand in hand with many of today’s most popular and widely-used finance tools to make it happen.
Today, I am excited to share more details about our work with BlackLine — the leading cloud-based financial operations management platform for modern finance and accounting teams.
As we explained at the launch, with a business environment that is growing increasingly volatile, unpredictable and challenging to navigate, finance teams are being called upon as strategic partners to their business now more than ever. This raises the stakes for strategic financial decision making and accelerates reporting timelines. Since then, the business climate has only gotten worse. The same goes for the demands on the office of finance.
The Analytics Data Hub for Finance can help — and with today’s newly released BlackLine integrations, it’s even more useful to even more teams around the world. In the words of Mark Donadio, Senior Director of Accounting at Light & Wonder — a joint customer of both Incorta and BlackLine:
“Incorta brings detailed transaction data from all our ERP systems into one place for our analytics and reporting needs. The platform gives us confidence in our data and is a huge time saver. Any BlackLine customer with multiple data sources should take a close look at using Incorta as their analytics data hub.”
Here’s a closer look at how BlackLine and the Incorta Analytics Data Hub for Finance work together:
BlackLine is now a data destination
The BlackLine platform helps finance teams automate and control the financial close process. More specifically, it helps organizations ensure balance sheet completeness, centralize and standardize the month-end close process, accelerate cash collections and optimize working capital.
As we recently announced, BlackLine is now integrated as a data destination within the Incorta Analytics Hub for Finance solution. That means IT teams working with Finance can now give users access to operational data, journal entries and subledger details for real-time analysis. For their counterparts in Finance, this integration gives them the power to freely drill into detailed transactional data for analysis, in turn slashing financial close cycle times and significantly improving the accuracy of financial plans, budgets and forecasts — all within their preferred accounting and financial planning environments.
The integrations add to a growing list of Analytics Data Hub for Finance data destinations, including Azure Synapse Analytics, Tableau, Power BI, Excel and Google Sheets — with more on the horizon.
BlackLine data application — now available in the Incorta Marketplace
We also recently unveiled the first BlackLine data application, which offers a dramatically faster and easier path to production for Oracle EBS data compared to traditional approaches involving custom code and lots of manual effort. Now available in the Incorta Marketplace, the BlackLine data application provides immediate access to Oracle EBS data — complete with self-service capabilities for drilling down into transaction-level details, streamlining accounting and reconciliation processes, and shrinking overall close cycle times.
You can think of data applications as containers for prebuilt analytic content derived from community expertise and best practices. Today, they are composed of: (1) physical schemas that map to the data source, (2) business views that reorganize the data to make it easier for business and casual users to understand, and (3) dashboards based on business views that provide metrics, tables and visualizations.
The Incorta Marketplace offers a comprehensive collection of Incorta data applications for popular data sources, business applications and finance use cases. These applications are rich in functionality and will grow even more fruitful over time (stay tuned!).
Better together
With these integrations, the Analytics Data Hub for Finance is now an even more powerful solution for accounting professionals and their partners in IT.
For IT teams, it’s never been faster or easier to consolidate disparate resources for financial close processes: They can add more data sources and integrate them with BlackLine without breaking a sweat. Incorta’s business views also make implementing business logic far more simple than dealing with raw data from multiple complex data sources. And the overall speed and efficiency is much better too. With the Analytics Data Hub for Finance, for example, one file gets imported to BlackLine and it happens more frequently versus having multiple teams sending multiple files which then require various degrees of transformation and aggregation.
For accountants, the integrated solution makes it possible to analyze transaction-level detail within the environment of their choosing — typically BlackLine. Instead of alternating between BlackLine and source business systems while performing account reconciliation, for example, they can simply access the details they need right inside the same platform. This helps streamline day-to-day operations, increases the speed and frequency of reporting, and instills greater confidence in the quality of the data.
What’s more, with BlackLine integrated into the Analytics Data Hub for Finance, accounting and IT teams alike benefit from:
- Ready access to detailed information: Accounting teams now have the ability to answer more complex questions quickly with the ability to access transaction-level detail in Incorta versus aggregate level detail. Teams no longer have to call and wait for information from IT.
- Broader data access: As data sources expand and grow, Incorta will bring these data sources into the Analytics Hub for Finance solution and make them available to BlackLine. Incorta will keep BlackLine up to date with the most recent data through its ability to incrementally update from the source systems and into BlackLine. Incorta supports 240+ data sources, 50+ native data connectors and hundreds of drivers.
- Reduced audit risks: Access transaction-level data to increase the reliability and integrity of their reconciliation, matching and reporting. The Analytics Data Hub for Finance solution reduces audit risks by enabling direct analysis of raw business data that is 100% identical to the source. Incorta uniquely allows even highly sensitive data to be safely analyzed, with fine-grained control over data access and governance.
Find out more and try it for yourself
IT organizations working with finance teams now have a more powerful and extensible solution for unifying financial and operational data, automating delivery of business-ready data with unrivaled speed and fortifying trust and confidence in data for better decision making in the office of finance.
To see how Incorta customers like Comcast, Meta, Quanta Services and others leverage prebuilt data applications to solve their top financial analytics challenges, watch Data App Week on-demand.
Prefer taking a more hands-on approach? Spin up a free trial and try it out for yourself today.