BLACKLINE INC

Overview

We have created comprehensive cloud-based solutions designed to transform and modernize accounting and finance operations for midsize and enterprise organizations in all industries globally. Our secure, scalable solutions transform critical processes, including financial close, intercompany accounting, invoice-to-cash, and consolidation. By introducing software that unifies critical data and enables process orchestration and automation, we empower accounting and finance professionals to improve the integrity of their financial reporting, reduce time spent on manual work, accelerate cash flows, and redeploy resources to focus on analysis and business partnership. With the recent acceleration of AI innovation and applications in the broader economy, we expect to further explore and possibly leverage such new and innovative technologies for optimized workflow, efficiencies, and value creation for our customers.

The integrity of an organization’s financial reports are rooted in critical accounting and finance processes that are often manual, inefficient and cumbersome and which may result in accounting errors and restatements, as well as significant deficiencies and material weaknesses. In addition, these manual accounting processes are unsuited for the increasing regulatory complexity and transaction volumes encountered by many businesses today. Traditional enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) systems do not generally provide effective solutions for processes handled outside of an organization’s general ledger, such as balance sheet substantiation, cash application, and intercompany transaction accounting. Many organizations also use multiple ERPs and other financial systems without a platform to efficiently integrate their data and processes. We are offering next-generation cloud-based solutions that address even more challenges for accounting and finance professionals by automating and streamlining accounting and finance operations in a manner that complements and supports traditional ERP systems. We believe our customers benefit from cost savings through improvements in process efficiency, accuracy, and staff productivity, in addition to maximizing cash flows and driving a faster record-to-report process.

Our mission is to inspire, power, and guide digital finance transformation by delivering a platform of solutions for the office of the Chief Financial Officer. Our approach modernizes accounting and finance operations by unifying accounting systems, data, and processes; automating manual, repetitive activities; enhancing transparency and control; and enabling more real-time delivery of critical accounting information. We believe the need for our software has been driven by growing business and information technology complexities, transaction volumes, and expanding regulatory requirements. Our software integrates with, and obtains data from, more than 30 different ERP systems, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage Intacct, and Jack Henry, as well as many other sources of financial data, such as banks, credit card providers, point-of-sale systems, sub-ledgers, and in-house applications.

BlackLine was founded in 2001. We are a holding company and conduct our operations through our wholly-owned subsidiary, BlackLine Systems, Inc. (“BlackLine Systems”) and its subsidiaries.

On September 12, 2023, we acquired Data Interconnect (“DI”), hereinafter referred to as the “DI Acquisition”. DI is a cloud-based invoice-to-cash automation vendor within the electronic invoice presentment and payment (“EIPP”) market. The primary purpose of the DI Acquisition was to complete our existing accounts receivable automation solution by adding EIPP capabilities to our platform. In doing so, we now offer a complete end-to-end invoice-to-cash process within the platform.

On January 26, 2022, we acquired FourQ Systems, Inc. (“FourQ”), which we refer to as the “FourQ Acquisition.” The primary purpose of the FourQ Acquisition was to enhance our existing intercompany accounting automation capabilities by driving end-to-end automation of traditionally manual intercompany accounting processes.

On October 2, 2020, we acquired Rimilia Holdings Ltd. (“Rimilia”), which we refer to as the “Rimilia Acquisition”. The primary purpose of the Rimilia Acquisition was to extend our capabilities into an adjacent area, adding accounts receivable automation to financial close automation.

Our cloud-based solutions include Account Reconciliations, Transaction Matching, Task Management, Financial Reporting Analytics, Journal Entry, Variance Analysis, Consolidation Integrity Manager, Compliance, Smart Close for SAP, BlackLine Cash Application, Credit & Risk Management, Collections Management, Disputes & Deductions Management, Team & Task Management, AR Intelligence, Electronic Invoicing & Compliance, Intercompany Create, Intercompany Balance and Resolve, and Intercompany Net and Settle. These solutions are offered to customers as scalable solutions that support critical record-to-report and invoice-to-cash processes.

Our Growth Strategy

Our principal growth strategies include the following:

Continue to Innovate and Expand our Solutions. Our ability to internally develop or make strategic acquisitions of new, market-leading applications and functionalities is integral to our success. We intend to deepen our existing capabilities and extend the functionality and range of our applications to bring new solutions to the office of the CFO.

Enhance our Leadership Position within the Marketplace. We intend to focus on customer expansion, geography, and industry to maintain and grow our leadership position.

•Customer Expansion: We believe we have a leading position in the market with both enterprise and select midsize companies. We intend to leverage our brand recognition, history of innovation, and customer focus to maintain and grow our leadership position with enterprise market businesses. We pursue a land-and-expand sales model and believe there is significant opportunity to increase sales of our solutions within our existing customer base. Our pricing model is designed to allow us to capture additional revenue as our customers’ usage of our platform grows, providing us with an opportunity to increase the lifetime value of our customer relationships.

•Geography: We believe that we have a significant opportunity to expand the use of our cloud-based solutions outside the United States (“U.S.”). We intend to invest in further expanding our global footprint through organic growth activities and strategic acquisitions.

•Industry: We intend to leverage our customer scale to innovate with industry-specific product extensions, specifically for industries where we have large total addressable market opportunities and strong brand permission with customers and partners.

Extend Our Relationships with Partners. We have established strong relationships with technology vendors such as SAP and Microsoft, professional services firms such as Deloitte and Ernst & Young, and business process outsourcers, such as Accenture and GenPact. We intend to deepen our relationships with our current partners, foster a thriving ecosystem of partnerships and partner with resellers who are well versed in the BlackLine suite and select software firms.

ERP Connectivity. We intend to broaden our partnership with SAP through the SAP solution-extension (“SolEx”) program, extend our technology integration capabilities with large ERP players, and maintain connectivity to other ERPs and third-party data sources.

BlackLine Solutions

We provide powerful cloud-based solutions designed to unify, automate, and streamline accounting and finance operations. The key elements of our solutions include:

Comprehensive Platform

We offer integrated suites of applications that deliver a broad range of capabilities to support critical accounting processes such as financial close, intercompany accounting, invoice-to-cash, and consolidation.

The technology underpinning our software includes a comprehensive base of accounting and finance-specific business logic and rules engines.

Integration

We provide simple, secure, and automated tools and integrations to transfer data to and from a range of enterprise-wide processes and systems, including ERPs, as well as many other sources of financial data from in-house applications and third-party providers. In addition, for companies with multiple systems and complex needs, we can connect with any number of general ledger systems simultaneously, resolving many of the issues associated with consolidating data across systems.

Independence

Our solutions are flexible and not dependent on any single operating system. They work with and complement most ERPs and other relevant financial systems our customers may use, enabling agility as organizations evolve and grow, whether organically or inorganically. Our independence from other systems also means we are able to focus on and innovate for the needs of our customers irrespective of updates or changes in our customers’ businesses and other systems. We believe this differentiates our solutions in the industry and reduces risk for customers.

Ease of Use

Our solutions are designed by accounting and finance professionals whose domain expertise and understanding of our customers’ challenges contributes to our software’s ease of use and customer experience. We strive to enable any user to rapidly implement our software to manage their accounting and finance activities, from the simplest to the most sophisticated tasks. Our user interface includes role-based dashboards and reports, provides clear visualization of accounting and finance data, enables user collaboration, and streamlines business processes.

Innovation

Our ability to develop innovative solutions has been a key driver of our success and organic growth. Through a history and culture of thought leadership, we created the next-generation of powerful software solutions that automate and streamline antiquated, manual accounting and finance processes to better meet our customers’ diverse and rapidly changing needs. We continue to focus on providing advanced solutions to other time and labor-intensive accounting and finance challenges.

Key Benefits

Our platform is designed to provide the following benefits to our customers:

Flexibility and scalability

Our solutions are designed for modern business environments and have broad applicability across enterprise and midsize organizations in almost any industry. Our solutions support complex corporate structures, provide integration across core financial systems, manage multiple currencies and languages, and scale to support high transaction volumes.

Embedded controls and workflow

Our solutions are designed for the complex global regulatory environment. Our solutions embed controls within standardized, repeatable, and well-documented workflows, which are designed to result in substantially reduced risk of non-compliance or negative audit findings, greater tolerance for regulatory complexity, and increased confidence in financial reports.

Real-time visibility

We provide users with real-time visibility into the status, progress, and quality of their accounting and finance processes. With configurable dashboards, user-defined reporting, and the ability to drill down to individual reconciliations, journal entries, and other tasks, users can track open activities, identify bottlenecks within a process, or intervene to prevent mistakes.

Automation and efficiency

Our solutions can ingest data from a variety of sources, including ERP systems and other data repositories, and apply powerful automation to financial close, intercompany accounting, invoice-to-cash, and consolidation processes. This streamlines accounting and finance processes, minimizes manual data entry and allows accounting and finance professionals to focus more of their time on value-added activities like analysis and business partnership.

Continuous processing

Our solutions help organizations embed quality control, compliance, and financial integrity into their day-to-day processes rather than rely on the traditional process of validating financial information at the end of each period. Activities such as account reconciliation and variance analysis can be performed in real-time, thus reducing the risk of errors and creating a more agile accounting environment.

Customers

Our customers include multinational corporations, large enterprises, and midsize companies across a broad array of industries. These businesses include publicly-listed entities and privately-owned enterprises, as well as non-profit entities. At December 31, 2023, we had 386,814 individual users across 4,398 customers, exclusive of on-premise software. We define a customer as an entity with an active subscription agreement as of the measurement date. In situations where an organization has multiple subsidiaries or divisions, each entity that is invoiced as a separate entity is treated as a separate customer. However, where an existing customer requests its invoice be divided for the sole purpose of restructuring its internal billing arrangement without any incremental increase in revenue, such customer continues to be treated as a single customer.

Solutions and Services

Our cloud-based solutions for the Office of the Chief Financial Officer are designed to be the primary system of interaction for accounting and finance professionals. Our solutions unify systems and data and work to drive accuracy, collaboration, efficiency, and control. Our solutions enable accounting and finance professionals to execute their work continuously, empowering real-time insights and business partnership. Our solution offerings are comprised of multiple products and capabilities, including financial close, intercompany accounting, and invoice-to-cash. We also provide resources and services for implementation.

Financial Close Management

The collection of processes by which organizations reconcile, consolidate, and report their financial information at the end of each period is referred to as record-to-report. For organizations of any size, the traditional way of closing the books is held together by manual processes and error-prone spreadsheets, increasing risk and threatening the accuracy of financial reporting. Our Financial Close Management solutions allow customers to standardize and automate key steps across the record-to-report process to ensure accuracy, control, and timeliness.

•Account Reconciliations provides a centralized workspace from which users can collaborate to substantiate their balance sheet by completing account reconciliations. Features include standardized templates, workflows for review and approval, linkage to policies and procedures, and integrated storage of supporting documentation. The product automates otherwise manual activities in the substantiation process, significantly reducing time and effort and increasing productivity. It also enhances internal controls by facilitating the appropriate segregation of duties, simplifying reconciliation audits and adding transparency and visibility to the reconciliation process.

•Transaction Matching analyzes and reconciles high volumes of individual transactions from different sources of data based upon user-configured logic. Our rules engine automatically identifies exceptions, errors, missing data, and variances within large data sets. The matching engine processes millions of records per minute, can be used with any type of data, and allows customers to reconcile transactions in real time.

•Task Management enables users to create and manage processes and task lists. The solution provides automatic and recurring task scheduling, includes configurable workflow, and provides a management console for accounting and finance activities. Though most commonly used with the financial close, users can create task lists and projects for hundreds of different use cases ranging from external audits to environmental impact surveys. The solution can be used as a cloud-based, controlled checklist that includes reporting and alerts to drive greater collaboration, accountability, and visibility.

•Financial Reporting Analyticsis a modern solution that enables analysis and validation of group level or consolidated financial data with direct, real-time visibility into the local or underlying details. The solution provides a centralized workspace with end-to-end transparency and automates ledger-to-ledger, statutory-to-GAAP, tax-to-GAAP, and system-to-system reconciliation to ensure the completeness and accuracy of consolidated fluctuation results.

•Journal Entry allows users to generate, review, and post manual journal entries. Many postings can be fully automated and calculated based on complex, customer-defined logic or automatically allocated across multiple business units. Validation and approval checkpoints help ensure the integrity of information passed to other financial applications, including hundreds of ERPs and subsystems, in a configurable, standardized format.

•Variance Analysis automatically calculates, identifies, and provides anomalous fluctuations in balance sheet and income statement account balances with “always-on” monitoring. Once an item needing investigation is identified, users are automatically alerted so they can research and determine the source of the fluctuation. Users can then document and sign off on explanations, enabling stronger control.

•Consolidation Integrity Manager manages the automated system-to-system tie-out process that occurs during the consolidation phase of the financial close. Companies with multiple ERPs utilize a consolidation system to produce their consolidated financial results. Because these systems contain and produce information that changes continually and requires constant adjustments, a final tie-out that is typically handled manually in a spreadsheet is necessary prior to publishing results. This product automates the tie-out process, aggregating balances from dozens or hundreds of different systems and allowing users to identify exceptions and create adjustments quickly.

•Compliance is an integrated solution that facilitates compliance-related initiatives, consolidates project management, and provides visibility over control self-assessments and testing.

•Smart Close for SAPis a fully embedded, purpose-built solution to streamline and automate the close directly in SAP. Smart Close complements our cloud financial close management solutions to achieve end-to-end automation. Purpose-built automation allows customers to automate task and job scheduling, verify the correctness of closing transactions, and take action, like raising alerts, making corrections, or pushing the closing process to the next step with job scheduling.

Intercompany Financial Management

Intercompany transactions occur when entities within a corporate parent organization transact with each other. These transactions are some of the most complex and frequent sources of uncertainty and process inefficiency for the controller organization, frequently causing imbalances that must be resolved. The intricate nature of intercompany transactions often drives accounting operations to process a substantial volume of intercompany charges within the constraints of the fiscal calendar, leaving insufficient time for enhancing the quality of the underlying data. This prevalent operational practice results in heightened stress for accounting and finance professionals, originating from an unproductive and avoidable workload. Often manual, time-consuming, and resource-intensive processes, intercompany transactions can have material impacts on costs if not managed properly. Our intercompany solutions manage the entire intercompany transaction lifecycle within our platform, from the initial creation of a transaction through the settlement. We believe it is the only widely-available, automated end-to-end intercompany solution maintained in a single platform. These solutions include:

•Intercompany Create increases visibility into transaction-level data by originating transactions directly within our software. Intercompany transactions are configured and executed with a simple process that uses billing routes to facilitate the flow of a transaction and the appropriate tax and transfer pricing mark-ups. The application stores permissions and business logic exceptions by entity, service, and transaction type, ensuring that both the seller and the buyer of the intercompany transaction are authorized to conduct business, while billing in a manner that optimizes process efficiency and minimizes tax leakage. Invoices are automatically generated for each respective jurisdiction and e-invoicing capabilities can send intercompany data to country-specific portals.

•Intercompany Balance & Resolve centralizes, streamlines, and automates intercompany reconciliation complexity and dispute management by capturing all intercompany transactions within the virtual subledger and providing resolution actions to reconcile. This feature reduces intercompany reconciliation risk, effort, and last-minute plugs by automatically flagging out-of-balance trading pairs and underlying transactions that create exceptions on a continuous basis. Open intercompany transactions are continuously analyzed to verify offsetting transactions on the respective trading partner books. Exceptions are flagged and users are automatically notified for investigation and resolution. Automated or workflow-based resolution actions and adjustments bring the balance back into line for settlement-ready balances.

•Intercompany Net and Settle enables real-time visibility into open intercompany transactions that integrate with treasury systems to facilitate and streamline netting, settlement, and clearing to optimize working capital. Using bilateral and multilateral netting to reduce the number of transactions that typically incur bank fees, treasury teams can effectively manage the manner that intercompany balances are closed out using cash and non-cash settlement methodologies to effectively manage the cash positions of each entity. Users can filter the information by transaction type, hold type, currency, or business relationship. This feature facilitates the process of netting transactions and helps users make informed, strategic decisions, while managing cash reporting and forecasting.

Invoice-to-Cash

Cash is vital to every business, and invoice-to-cash is central to improving cash flow. Managing invoice-to-cash well means maximizing working capital by collecting cash and minimizing credit losses. This critical process is often highly manual. Our unified suite helps customers collect cash, provide credit, and better understand cash flow.

•Cash Application transforms the order-to-cash cycle by significantly reducing the time it takes to apply cash receipts to open invoices, resulting in significant reductions in unapplied cash. BlackLine Cash Application drives an automated and effective end-to-end process from an invoice-to-cash in the bank and fully applied in the subledger. It uses intelligent automation to help customers accurately apply payments to customers’ invoices in an ERP. Embedded machine learning then reduces the manual effort involved in the process and releases working capital for our customers.

•Credit & Risk Management brings customer and payment behavior data together to enable optimal risk strategies and real-time risk profiling. Managing the balance between sales and risk of non-payment is critical to profitability. Credit & Risk Management brings together data from numerous sources, such as credit reference agencies, credit insurers, and payment performance to understand historical indebtedness and behavior trends of the companies with whom our customers work. This solution works in tandem with our Collections Management solution to help organizations better understand their customer base and make informed decisions around collection strategies, recovery sequences, and the prioritization of team tasks.

•Collections Management helps customers design collection strategies to fit each of their customer’s sales ledger profile. Releasing cash from customers is the fastest way to increase working capital. Collections Management streamlines the collections process and unlocks more cash from companies with automated escalating recovery sequences that enable collections teams to better prioritize their work by understanding which customers require attention. Customers gain real-time clarity into what actions and collection strategies are working at each stage of the collection process and can use this information to collect payments more efficiently, leading to reduced days sales outstanding and improved customer relationships.

•Disputes & Deductions Management helps our customers track payment disputes to drive prompt response and resolution. Unresolved disputes lead to uncollected revenue and can threaten profitability. Disputes & Deductions logs, monitors, and analyzes invoice disputes and provides our customers automated workflows to accelerate dispute resolution and protect their customer relationships.

•Team & Task Management automates accounts receivable teams’ tasks while ensuring timely execution by using data to drive priority of actions. The historically manual work behind accounts receivable processes can lead to siloed work and a lack of end-to-end visibility. Team & Task Management provides full visibility into the accounts receivable process, monitors critical actions against the volume of work, and allocates resources based on team capacity to prioritize risk management and cash collection.

•AR Intelligence automatically processes, analyzes, and surfaces critical information, such as sales and payment performance data, customer payment trends, and days sales outstanding. This solution unifies the data across BlackLine’s Invoice-to-Cash suite to provide data typically difficult to obtain in real-time. Customers using this solution gain insights into customer behavior, as well as the ability to measure the impact of extended payment terms to cash collections and cash flow, and understand the predictability of customer payments when building cash flow forecasts.

•Electronic Invoicing & Compliance helps our customers generate, send, and monitor invoices in diverse e-invoice formats through a multitude of delivery channels. Customers can download invoices through secure, branded, customer invoice portals. BlackLine’s Electronic Invoicing & Compliance can provide financial flexibility with the ability to service inbound customer payments through a range of versatile payment channels. BlackLine Invoicing & Compliance allows customers to adapt and adhere to country-specific requirements with evolving e-invoicing regulations across various countries.

Services

Customer service is essential to our customers' success. We offer the following services:

•Professional- With a focus on configuration over customization, our implementation approach favors rapid and efficient deployments led by accounting experts, rather than technical resources. A typical project will focus on mapping our application to a customer’s current or ideal process, coaching them on best practices, and helping organizations become self-sufficient, instead of dependent on additional professional services. For customers that elect to work with a partner or business process outsourcer for implementation services, BlackLine provides partner training and certification, as well as support for partner-led projects.

•Training & Education- We offer a variety of live and web-based training options through BlackLine University. Many customers consume their training through our e-learning environment, while others select both live and e-learning. Courses cover solutions functionality, as well as the underlying concepts and demonstrate the power of our platform like financial close, intercompany accounting, invoice-to-cash, and consolidations.

•Customer Success- Our customer success managers, many of whom are former users, provide customers with best practices and create a success plan for expanded usage of our platform for process optimization. A success plan is central to increased customer value and customer adoption. This approach positively impacts our retention and upsell efforts.

•Transformation - Our transformation team assists with optimization strategies for transformation projects through the BlackLine Optimization Academy where we teach accountants how to optimize their accounting and reporting processes. Customers learn what processes can benefit from optimization and can choose to undertake the optimization process themselves or choose our consulting services or strategic customer advisory services to continue their journey.

•Global Support-From our offices in Australia, Canada, England, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and the U.S., we provide tiered customer support, ranging from support provided during business hours to 24/7/365 support. All customers have access to essential support through our support and community portal, included as part of their subscription. In 2023, we rolled out two additional tiers of support that customers can purchase based on their needs.

Sales and Marketing

We sell our solutions through our direct sales force. Our direct sales force leverages our relationships with technology vendors such as SAP and Microsoft, professional services firms such as Deloitte and Ernst & Young and business process outsourcers, such as Accenture and Genpact, to influence and drive customer growth. Since 2018, we have partnered with SAP, incorporating them into the reseller channel that we use in the ordinary course of business. SAP has the ability to resell our solutions, as SolEx, for which we receive a percentage of the revenues. SolEx allows us to provide the highest level integration with SAP ERP solutions. Going forward, we intend to become a more partner-powered organization, harnessing the deep and embedded relationships our partners have with key decision-makers at our customers.

Our marketing efforts are focused on demand generation, establishing and extending our brand proposition, generating product awareness, and cultivating our community of users. We generate demand primarily through word-of-mouth, search engine marketing, campaigns and events, and our network of business process outsourcers, business services organizations and resellers. We leverage online and offline marketing channels on a global basis, organize customer roundtables and user conferences, and release white papers, case studies, blogs, and other resources. We execute co-marketing activities with partners such as SAP, Ernst & Young, and Deloitte. We further extend our brand awareness through sponsorships with leading industry organizations such as the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, or AICPA, the Institute of Management Accountants, or IMA, the Financial Executives International, or FEI, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, or ICAEW, and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, or ACCA.

Competition

The market for accounting and financial software and services is competitive, rapidly evolving and requires a deep understanding of the industry standards, accounting rules, and global financial regulations.

We compete with vendors of financial automation software and with software offered by certain ERP vendors. Further, other established software vendors not currently focused on accounting and finance software and services, including some of our partners, resellers, and other parties with which we have relationships, may expand their services to compete with us.

We believe the principal competitive factors in our market include the following:

•depth and breadth of solutions;

•level of customer satisfaction;

•ease of deployment and use of applications;

•ability to integrate with multiple legacy enterprise infrastructures and third-party applications;

•domain expertise on accounting best practices;

•ability to innovate and respond to customer needs rapidly;

•capability for configurability, integration, and scalability of applications;

•cloud-based delivery model;

•advanced security and reliability features;

•brand recognition and historical operating performance; and

•price and total cost of ownership.

We believe we are positioned favorably against our competitors based on these factors. However, certain of our competitors may have greater name recognition, longer operating histories, more established customer and marketing relationships, larger marketing budgets, and significantly greater resources.

Intellectual Property and Proprietary Rights

Our intellectual property and proprietary rights are important to our business. We currently have two patents. We primarily rely on copyright, trade secret and trademark laws, trade secret protection, and confidentiality or license agreements with our employees, customers, partners, and others to protect our intellectual property rights. Though we rely in part upon these legal and contractual protections, we believe that factors such as the skills and ingenuity of our employees and the functionality and frequent enhancements to our solutions are larger contributors to our success in the marketplace.

Despite our efforts to preserve and protect our intellectual property and proprietary rights, unauthorized third parties may attempt to copy, reverse engineer, or otherwise obtain portions of our software. Competitors may attempt to develop similar solutions that could compete in the same market as our solutions. Unauthorized disclosure of our confidential information by our employees or third parties could occur. Laws of other jurisdictions may not protect our intellectual property and proprietary rights from unauthorized use or disclosure in the same manner as the U.S. The risk of unauthorized use of our proprietary and intellectual property rights may increase as we continue to expand outside of the U.S.

Third-party infringement claims are also possible in our industry, especially as software functionality and features expand, evolve and overlap with other industry segments.

Human Capital

BlackLine's approximately 1,750 employees worldwide contribute their unique talents, experience, and backgrounds to inspire, power, and guide digital finance transformation. We are committed to driving a culture of inclusion and innovation through our programs designed to attract, develop, retain, and engage exceptional talent aligned with our values of Think, Create, Serve, and Deliver.

Through a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, health and safety, comprehensive compensation and benefits, employee engagement, and training and development, we strive to cultivate a culture where employees thrive. Our workforce strategy is driven by a continued focus on our employee culture, including how we find, develop, and retain talent. Every BlackLine employee has access to resources designed to help them improve their well-being, understand the value of their work, develop their career, and thrive professionally.

Attract

Our core values of Think, Create, Serve, and Deliver, and our embedded approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion, are the underpinnings of our culture. We embrace the unique value of each person’s life experiences and seek candidates from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences to join our team. In addition, we believe that fostering an equitable and inclusive environment that brings together diverse teams better positions us to unlock innovation. We focus on building an inclusive culture and diverse workforce through a variety of company initiatives, beginning with our hiring practices and our commitment to continually build diversity into our recruiting pipeline. Over the past year, we have expanded our investment and partnerships with underrepresented groups and organizations to increase our reach to diverse candidates.

Develop

We believe that one of the primary reasons candidates join BlackLine is for career development opportunities, and we have several programs and resources to help our employees explore, develop, and achieve their career goals. We invest in our employees’ career growth and provide a wide range of development opportunities, self-directed learning, and support for continuing education through access to professional development and reimbursement programs. BlackLine employees are also offered robust training related to BlackLine products and formal and informal on-the-job training. Career growth and development opportunities are available to all employees, including internal promotions and transfers.

Retain

To retain our workforce, we strive to offer competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits programs. We review our compensation practices, both in terms of our overall workforce and individual employees, to ensure our pay practices are fair and equitable. Our compensation program is built on a pay-for-performance foundation that is designed to attract, motivate, reward, and retain talented individuals who possess the skills and domain expertise necessary to support our business, contribute to our strategic goals, and create long-term value for our shareholders. We provide employees with competitive compensation packages that include base salary plus a bonus, commission, or incentive plan, access to our employee stock purchase plan, where applicable, and equity awards to encourage performance and retention of our top talent.

Corporate Information

We were incorporated in May 2001. Our principal executive offices are located at 21300 Victory Blvd, 12th Floor, Woodland Hills, California 91367, and our telephone number is (818) 223-9008.

The names “BlackLine,” “BlackLine Systems,” “BlackLine Cash Application,” and our logo are our trademarks. This Annual Report on Form 10-K also contains trademarks and trade names of other businesses that are the property of their respective holders. We have omitted the ® and ™ designations, as applicable, for the trademarks we name in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Available Information

Our website is located at www.blackline.com, and our investor relations website is located at http://investors.blackline.com. We have used, and intend to continue to use, our Investor Relations website as a means of disclosing material public information and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD. Copies of our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to these reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, are available, free of charge, on our investor relations website as soon as reasonably practicable after we file such material electronically with or furnish it to the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC. The SEC also maintains a website that contains our SEC filings. The address of the site is www.sec.gov.