BlackLine vs. Wolters Kluwer CCH® Tagetik

BlackLine is well-suited for us when it comes to the bank reconciliations, as our systems feed right into BlackLine, and the various match sets reconcile the data effortlessly. BlackLine would work to its fullest extent if all departments utilized it, so you can take advantage of all the various products that are available.

Well suited for large multi-entity international, multi-currency, multi GAAP groups with excellent report writing features, customizations, and validation traps with minimal IT support. The ability to customize dimensions and dimension structures is a key strength. The intuitive user interface enables easy adoption by new users and training times are short. Upload features via embedded customisable ETL and standardised Excel templates are very efficient. Error checking is intuitive and helpful. Less appropriate for small single entity businesses.

Incentivized

• Maintains certification records, clearly showing reviews and approvals of tasks and reconciliations.
• It has multiple reconciliation templates, allowing the user to find the best template for their needs.
• It includes useful metrics and visuals to help the user keep track of their assignments and tasks/reconciliations that are coming due.

Incentivized

• Processes are clearly described in CCH Tagetik ; users can easily find where they are and which action they have to make
• Interaction with Excel is really fluid ; the Excel add-in is easy to deploy and to updgrade, in the hand of users. It is reliable provided the internet connection is fast.
• Managing hierachies is obvious in CCH Tagetik. Hierarchies are fundamental for a good reporting ; CCH Tagetik has obviously a deep experience of this feature.
• SaaS : our experience with CCH Tagetik is of only 1 year, but it technically performs well, the system is reponsive, no shut-down, and updates (every quarter) do not disturb production.
• AIH seems to be able to manage very large quantity of data, and to provide advanced analysis functionalities. We did not have time to explore them.

Incentivized

• On the home page I can see Team Assignments usually first time not My assignments.
• JV posting is slow.
• Many error emails about failed JV with the same context.
• We receive emails about task certification. Can we receive the list of reconciliations monthly?
• Posted/prepared JVs cannot be deleted from the to-do list (there is only one extraordinary case, where we had a BL issue and the JV was booked but without a Document ID).

Incentivized

• The steps of setting up the loading of data is slightly painful.
• The steps and error message while connecting the process workflow has to provide a hint on which area needed to be fixed (because it could be anywhere or anything).
• The combination of 2 segments for the excel upload on what's needed to eliminate is yet to resolved. Which made the entire list very long.

Incentivized

Because this is a great tool with many possibilities and cool perks. Plus, as an admin - because I am both user and admin - I can say that this is easy to handle, you don't even have to be able to write a single piece of code to do so

Incentivized

Based on our business requirements, its current implementation and way of use (in terms of the efficiceny) it's more than certain that we will renew our contract with CCH Tagetik. CCH Tagetik increased our efficiency regarding reporting and provides more features which made it easier to take decisions. Besides of that, it provided he best solutions for reporting according to the Solvency II standards. Since this is still the case, it is also a reason to stay with CCH Tagetik.

Incentivized

There are some processes that we currently use that cannot be done in BlackLine. Our users don't want to change their processes or learn new processes even though it would make their jobs easier. We have very few users who have adopted BlackLine fully, and management has not made it a requirement to use the application.

Incentivized

On a general level, it is a flexible, streamlined system, that can integrate operational data with accounting data for a better financial overview and budget planning. Reporting wise, the types and the amount of data analysis available or that can be created are close to endless. Having a quicker, more flexible way of analysing data certainly means better, faster reporting and better use of the data itself.

Incentivized

We never experienced an outage with BlackLine. The only time the system was unavailable was during planned outages for updates and upgrades usually Friday evening after 6pm pst until Saturday morning at 6am pst.

Incentivized

CCH Tagetik has alwyas been there in case we need help. In almost 20 years of commercial relationship, I have no evidence of times in which they were not available to answer a question or to solve an issue linked to their products, timely and efficiently.

Incentivized

BlackLine performs rather quickly considering the amount of data we were pushing in and out of it.

Incentivized

As you can see, speed depends on the applications but also on the hardware that runs them. As far as CCH Tagetik improved, we saw the benefit of a cloud-based solution which could solve many speed performance issues.

Incentivized

In my experience, the support team is beyond exceptional. They are incredibly knowledgeable and dedicated to the customer. You can expect prompt, professional and succinct responses. I have been working with the support team for BlackLine for more than ten years where I have been a customer four times. If anyone does Support right, it is definitely BlackLine. Not only can you trust your financials, but you can trust the team to support you through all your objectives!

I have had the pleasure of attending some courses at the dutch offices of CCH Tagetik. These were very educational with excellent trainers, a very enjoyable accomodation and they helped me a lot with regards to starting to use CCH Tagetik.

the training was not bad, but we got more training from working with the consultants. This because it is based on our system

Incentivized

Trainings are available for all topics on the BlackLine U portal. These were incredibly helpful when first starting with BlackLine to get the hang of it. Trainings are useful for any module. I have personally used this to teach myself how to use the tasks and variance modules, which are now fully utilized by my organization. The support team is also very helpful in training our team on anything additional we have needed.

Incentivized

Online training is the only form of training we could deploy during the pandemic. This service has been nonethless delivered with the same standards and the same results of the traditional training procedures.

Incentivized

You will have to meet up with your final users, approver, internal auditor and accounting policy holder. Everyone has to agree. When you have a well written process, workflow, policy, approval requirement, and control, your implementation process will be much easier

we did it in a coaching model. This allowed us to have 2 key advantages: we got to know the system very well and managed to save on the implementation cost. This worked well, was maybe a bit slower since we had to do this in our spare time. Nevertheless I strongly recommand

Incentivized

I have not used any of the other products, but we did evaluate them during our discovery phase. BlackLine was the "Cadillac" of the product offerings. You could get a similar product, and maybe even at a lower cost, but we wanted the best of the best, and that's what BlackLine is. We wanted a product that we could grow into, rather than a product we would outgrow over time as our organization grows. We have only touched the surface with BlackLine so far, and we've already reaped the benefits.

Incentivized

Oracle Essbase is another EPM software that we used but compared to Tagetik, it's not user friendly and the creation of dimensions and describing rules are more technically difficult. Drill down and analysis are not as easy as double clicking on Cch tagetik for immediate information. But as I have not used this software much and tagetik more, this is all I can say

After implementing BlackLine our company acquired another large company with multiple operations. We were able to use the COVID shutdown to bring them on board with BlackLine with little effort in the setup and training of the users.

Incentivized

A good and performing scalability both on a geographical and a legal entity scale. The link with MS Office suite allows an easy deployment of the application, especially for contributors.

Incentivized

• Improved visibility into reconciliations & tasks.
• Ability to centralize certain functions across the team into one role, as opposed to having multiple team members perform the same function for their entities.
• While not a negative impact, it's important to note that getting the best use of BlackLine is a time commitment. The time, resources, and energy you put into it will determine how successful you are at utilizing BlackLine to transform how your team gets the job done. This optimization journey is a continuous evolution and will not be an overnight transformation.

• It has definitely helped to standardize reporting across the company. Teams are able to pull the same reports and everything has the same feel to it.
• Since there are so many standard reports that we are able to create, it makes the analysts jobs easier since they are not spending so much time re-creating reports.
• With any system, there is going to be some admin work required. Creating new reports, accounts and entities does take time, but it is fairly simple and doesn't take a ton of time.

Incentivized