That reflection is desperately needed. Across the country, finance functions still lean heavily on complex Excel workbooks and manual reconciliations to get through the close.
Month-end comes around every four weeks regardless of resourcing, and Boyne says many teams feel they are permanently running just to stand still.
“Most people are already at capacity just keeping their heads above water,” he says. “As soon as one month-end finishes, the next one starts. The shutdown is often the only time they can step back and ask: are we doing this in the best way, or just the way we’ve always done it?”
Tridant is a leading BlackLine solution provider, partnering with the cloud-based financial close and accounting automation specialist to deliver its platform for CFOs and finance teams.
BlackLine’s platform standardises and automates tasks such as balance sheet reconciliations, journals and intercompany transactions, replacing complex, error-prone spreadsheets.
Boyne has so far helped some 150 organisations across Australia and New Zealand evaluate, implement and improve financial close platforms. His team of accountants, rather than pure technologists, is hired to challenge old habits before those processes are automated.
“The default temptation is to say: ‘Let’s take our current process and automate it’,” he says. “But if you simply lift and shift a flawed process into a new system, you won’t get the full benefit. The real value comes from asking what you should be doing, not just what you’re doing today.”
That matters because manual, spreadsheet-driven close cycles are not only labour-intensive, they also carry risks that are hard to see from the inside.
Mac Weaver, senior vice president and general manager, BlackLine APAC, says the biggest pain points they encounter are “the excessive time wasted on repetitive, low-value tasks and the high risk of human error from relying on spreadsheets”.
Boyne sees this up close when Tridant helps clients move their reconciliations and journals into BlackLine.
“Excel is very flexible and accountants love it, but there can be all sorts of nasty little things hiding in those giant workbooks that sit on people’s desktops,” he says. “When we bring those processes into a platform, we often uncover issues that have been sitting there the whole time – it’s the classic ‘Excel has problems, but not my Excel’ mindset.”
By replacing fragile spreadsheets with a standardised platform, finance leaders can dramatically improve control and visibility over the close. Automation reduces the effort involved in matching transactions and preparing reconciliations, while strengthening the underlying controls.
“BlackLine’s platform applies intelligent automation not just to match transactions, but to embed the rules and logic that govern the entire close process, creating a single source of truth for financial data.” Weaver says.
“That real-time visibility lets leaders unlock value, maintain data integrity and transform the demanding year-end period into a controlled, efficient process.”
For Boyne, the benefits go beyond saving time. He says platforms such as BlackLine allow finance teams to standardise how reconciliations and close tasks are prepared across the organisation, making it easier to share work and build resilience.
“As an auditor I’d go into different organisations and every balance sheet reconciliation looked completely different,” he says. “Finance teams live with that too – Joe’s working paper looks nothing like Samantha’s. Once you standardise on a platform, everything is consistent. When someone changes roles, they can pick up a new area and make sense of it quickly.”
That consistency and transparency are increasingly important as finance leaders try to make better use of their people’s skills. By automating manual accounting tasks, modern finance teams can shift more time into analysis, scenario-planning and business partnering, rather than firefighting the next close.
Ultimately, the holiday shutdown gives finance leaders a window to tackle these questions without the usual month-end pressure.
It’s a time to review which tasks genuinely require human judgement, which can be automated, and how to redesign processes so the team can focus on higher-value work before the June rush begins.
“Finance teams don’t often get the luxury of time to think about how they work,” Boyne says. “Using the shutdown to modernise the close can put them in a much stronger position for year-end – not just faster, but more accurate, more resilient and better prepared for what comes next.”
To find out how you can use this year-end period to get ahead, visit BlackLine.