Structuring your financial systems governance council

BlackLine governance and continuous improvement is critical for long-term platform success. Setting up a global governance council can help—creating one center of excellence (COE) to align your global strategy and drive policy decisions.  

There are a lot of benefits to having one centralized place, like ensuring that key balance sheet reconciliation components are defined and enforced, that roles and responsibilities are clearly outlined, and that the span of control is optimized to manage workloads effectively. These rules streamline reporting as well—assigning ownership of key reports with defined deadlines and tracking metrics that are consistent across sectors and markets to be measured over time. 

Here’s how we suggest structuring your council: 

Roles and responsibilities 

Global admin/COE lead 

• Update global settings 
• Set up periods 
• Drive global standardization 
• Develop and distributes standard reporting packages 
• Add/remove users 
• Update account rules 
• Effort: Dedicated role 

Local admins 

Note: Your global admin may also own local administration for local geography 

• Update account meta-data as needed 
• Change account assignments (like in instances of local turnover) 

Approvers and preparers 

Note: Create a subset of users as “super users” 

• Certify accounts 
• Reject accounts 
• Run self-service reporting 

For more ways to drive efficiency in BlackLine, explore our time-to-value analysis of activities within your platform.