Susan Parcells Director of Finance Transformation BlackLine Systems

BlackLine Systems client company TTX will join the financial software company for a presentation at the Hackett Group 2014 Best Practices Conference this week at the Peninsula Hotel in Chicago. 

The conference program, built on case studies of top-performing companies, will examine how world-class organizations reduce costs and create added value, showcasing the experiences of senior business executives in finance, human resources, information technology, procurement, supply chain and global business services.  The overall theme will be "Accelerating Growth from Innovation."

A company's balance sheet is the most comprehensive indicator of how the company is doing.  Ensuring that this information is accurate is extremely critical but not always easy to achieve.  Accounting/Finance managers and Compliance executives around the world use the BlackLine Financial Close Suite to automate traditionally manual, labor-intensive and spreadsheet-driven account reconciliation and financial close processes in an effort to ensure accuracy in the bottom line numbers.

Susan Parcells, CPA, BlackLine Systems vice president of Finance Transformation, will lead a presentation at this year's conference entitled "Close with Confidence and Achieve Balance Sheet Integrity."   The session, scheduled for 5:45 p.m. CDT on Tuesday, April 29(th), will focus on ways the CFO can improve control and visibility surrounding the financial close by automating traditionally manual accounting processes, such as account reconciliations.  Previously, Finance organizations had to rely primarily on spreadsheets that often lead to hidden errors, resulting in costly mistakes.

Susan will be joined by Michael Shultz, manager of Financial Reporting for TTX Company, one of North America's leading rail car and related freight car management services providers to the railroad industry in the United States, Canada and Mexico.  Michael will share how TTX is able to "close with confidence and achieve balance sheet integrity" by using software to improve efficiency and enhance visibility and control around the close process.

Attendees will hear how they can:

• Implement technology to automate the entire financial close process, increasing control and visibility across the board
• Ensure timely, accurate and documented communications among all departments (accounting, finance, compliance, auditing, etc.)
• Realize return-on-investment in a short timeframe
• Improve the accuracy and timeliness of compliance reporting
• Define responsibility and process ownership
• Manage compliance while servicing multiple locations

For more information, contact howard.goldstein@blackline.com.

BlackLine Systems was the first to develop and offer a commercially available Balance Sheet Account Reconciliation solution.  An experienced provider of software to companies from the Fortune 100 to beyond the Fortune 1,000, BlackLine provides quick-to-implement, scalable and easy-to-use applications that automate the entire financial close process to help improve financial controls for companies of all sizes.  With more than 85,000 users in over 100 countries, BlackLine software applications complement existing Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

Though ERP-agnostic, the BlackLine Financial Close Suite for SAP® Solutions is an SAP-endorsed business solution - joining the ranks of fewer than 40 other software offerings globally that are endorsed by the enterprise application software leader.  BlackLine also is an SAP Gold Partner.

BlackLine offers clients its enterprise-class financial software in a simple and secure SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform.  With a proven track record and a commitment to customer success, BlackLine seeks to reduce the burden the financial close places on accounting and finance professionals.

BlackLine headquarters are in Los Angeles, with offices in Atlanta, Chicago, London, Melbourne, New York City and Sydney to serve the company's growing global client base.  For more information, please visit .