BLACKLINE, INC. (BL) Business

Item 1.    Business

Overview

The Office of the Chief Financial Officer (“CFO”) is relied upon to deliver timely and accurate financial reporting and business insights. The CFO role has evolved from traditional accounting processes to driving growth, profitability, and governance across the enterprise to improve business outcomes while finance and accounting teams are facing unprecedented system and process complexity, growing data volumes, and evolving regulatory requirements, coupled with expanding roles and responsibilities. As a result, digital transformation has become a top priority for CFOs, as they require powerful technology to meet these demands.

At BlackLine, our mission is to inspire, power, and guide digital finance transformation for the Office of the CFO. Our secure, flexible, and scalable cloud-based platform empowers finance and accounting teams to achieve future-ready financial operations, modernizing processes for mid-size and enterprise organizations across all industries.

Many organizations rely on enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) systems to manage general ledger activities. However, these systems often fail to address end-to-end processes that occur across other systems and in spreadsheets, hampering an organization’s ability to deliver accurate data, insights, controls, and transparency. Our platform connects data and processes at their origin, enhancing financial reporting integrity, streamlining activities, and delivering faster insights. This approach drives immediate impact and sustained value, maximizes cash flow, and accelerates the record-to-report and invoice-to-cash processes.

Our platform integrates with the leading ERP systems offered by Workday, Inc., SAP SE (“SAP”), Oracle Corporation, Microsoft Dynamics 365 (“Microsoft Dynamics”), an application offered by Microsoft Corporation (“Microsoft”), Sage Intacct, Inc., and NetSuite, Inc. It also connects to diverse financial data sources, including banks, point-of-sale, treasury, payroll, procurement, and other systems, bringing data into unified workflows. This deep connectivity provides finance and accounting teams with accurate, actionable insights, reducing errors and

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improving compliance. This, in turn, frees finance and accounting teams to focus on complex, high-value challenges where human judgement is essential.

For nearly 25 years, BlackLine has pioneered customer-centric innovation in financial software, optimizing mission-critical processes for the Office of the CFO. BlackLine’s Studio360 Platform, Verity AI capabilities, and our comprehensive record-to-report and invoice-to-cash solutions uniquely address the increasing complexity of data, systems, and processes.

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. Our growth has been driven by a combination of organic innovation and a series of strategic acquisitions and initiatives, including the following:

Our cloud-based solutions, delivered by our BlackLine Studio360 Platform, include Account Reconciliations, Transaction Matching, Task Management, Reporting & Analysis, Journal Entry, Journals Risk Analyser, Account Analysis, Consolidation, Compliance, Smart Close for SAP, Cash Application, Credit & Risk Management, Collections Management, Disputes & Deductions Management, Team & Task Management, AR Intelligence, Electronic Invoicing & Payments, Intercompany Create, Intercompany Balance & Resolve, and Intercompany Net & Settle.

In September 2025, we launched Verity, a comprehensive suite of AI capabilities that provides finance and accounting teams with a digital workforce of embedded and auditable AI. Verity is integrated throughout our solutions and supports a broad range of use cases across our customers’ financial operations, offering flexible capabilities that help deliver best practices across end-to-end record-to-report and invoice-to-cash processes.

On December 15, 2025, we acquired WiseLayer, (“WL” and such acquisition, the “WL Acquisition”), a New York-based company that has pioneered a digital workforce of AI-powered agents to automate complex, judgment-based finance and accounting processes. The primary purpose of the WL Acquisition is to accelerate BlackLine’s own AI roadmap and in so doing, strengthen our competitive offering, which is focused on transforming and modernizing finance and accounting, against key competitors.

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, particularly those powered by AI, is integral to our success. Our recent launch of Verity is a testament to our commitment to delivering advanced, AI-powered solutions. 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 mid-size 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 a significant opportunity to increase sales of our solutions within our existing customer base. Additionally, we intend to focus on expanding and developing solutions tailored for the complex needs of public sector organizations. Our pricing model is designed to enable us to capture additional revenue as our customers’ usage of our platform grows, thereby increasing 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 in most G20 nations. We intend to invest in further expanding our global footprint through organic growth activities and strategic acquisitions.

•Industry: We continue to leverage our customer scale to innovate with industry-specific solutions, especially for industries where we have large 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, Microsoft Dynamics, Workday, Google, and Snowflake, Inc. (“Snowflake”), professional services firms, such as Accenture plc (“Accenture”), Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (“Deloitte”), Ernst & Young Global Limited (“Ernst & Young”), KPMG International Limited (“KPMG”), BDO Global (“BDO”), and Grant Thornton International Ltd. (“Grant Thornton”), and business process outsourcers, such as CapGemini SE (“CapGemini”), GenPact Ltd (“GenPact”), and RSM US LLP (“RSM”). We intend to deepen our relationships with our current

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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 leverage our BlackLine Studio360 Platform further to extend our technology integration capabilities with large ERP players, and maintain connectivity to other ERPs and third-party data sources.

Cloud Marketplaces. We have established the ability to purchase BlackLine solutions through Cloud Marketplaces on Google Cloud Platform (“GCP”), Microsoft Azure (“Azure”), and Amazon Web Services (“AWS”). This enables our customers to leverage their committed spend with those cloud providers for a software purchase with BlackLine.

BlackLine Platform, Products, and Capabilities

We provide a unified, scalable, and flexible platform tailored to the evolving needs of the Office of the CFO and deliver a purpose-built suite of applications that address critical processes, including record-to-report and invoice-to-cash. Our software and services provide critical technology and industry-leading practices that deliver accurate, efficient, and intelligent financial operations.

BlackLine Studio360 Platform

In today’s dynamic business environment, the Office of the CFO faces unprecedented challenges: managing complex systems, siloed data, and demands for real-time, accurate insights to enable strategic decision-making and drive business outcomes. Traditional, fragmented solutions cannot accommodate the increasing complexity of data, systems, and processes. The need for a flexible, scalable, and unified platform that provides a single source of trusted financial and accounting information has never been greater. BlackLine’s Studio360 Platform addresses these challenges by providing an infrastructure and capabilities to further unify our products and services, which include:

•Studio360 Integrate: Powerful and flexible capabilities for unifying, cleansing, and transforming data through pre-built connectors and APIs, ensuring a single source of truth for finance and accounting teams;

•Studio360 Orchestrate: The industry’s most extensive capabilities to map, optimize, and automate workflows across BlackLine applications, ERPs, and other applications like procurement, payroll, revenue, treasury, fixed assets, and more, with real-time progress tracking and event-based scheduling;

•Studio360 Visualize: Real-time, AI-powered insights, anomaly detection, exception handling, and KPI monitoring through customizable dashboards and reports, enabling CFOs to make fast, data-driven decisions;

•Studio360 Blueprint: An extensive library of proven process design templates grounded in customer-informed industry best practices, enabling rapid deployment and achievable transformation outcomes. BlackLine and its world-leading partners continuously contribute to and expand this library, ensuring it remains up-to-date and adaptable to evolving customer needs; and

•Studio360 Control: A centralized hub for administering and enforcing financial data hierarchies, policies, and certifications to strengthen governance and risk management.

Solutions

Our cloud-based solutions for the Office of the CFO are designed to be the primary point 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 partnerships.

Products and Services

Our products are comprised of record-to-report and invoice-to-cash solutions. We also provide implementation services.

Record-to-Report - Financial Close & Consolidation

The collection of processes by which organizations record, 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, traditional processes are heavily manual and rely upon error-prone spreadsheets, increasing risk and threatening the accuracy

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of financial reporting. Our Financial Close & Consolidation solutions allow customers to standardize and automate key steps across the record-to-report process to ensure accuracy and control. Our products include:

•Transaction Matching is an effective solution that automates the reconciliation of high-volume and complex transactions, significantly reducing the risk of financial misstatement and increasing the efficiency of our customers' finance and accounting operations. The solution enhances and transforms data by applying rules to normalize formats, parse fields, and perform calculations. Our rules engine then automatically identifies exceptions, errors, missing data, and variances within these large data sets. By processing millions of records per minute, our customers can reconcile transactions in real time, ensuring data integrity and accelerating their financial close process.

•Journal Entry allows users to generate, review, and post manual journal entries. Many postings can be fully automated, 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;

•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, enhanced with AI-enabled summarization. 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;

•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;

•Smart Close for SAP is fully embedded in the SAP UX and streamlines and automates key closing activities. 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 automatically trigger the appropriate response, like raising alerts, making corrections, or pushing the closing process to the next step with job scheduling;

•Reporting & Analysis enables analysis and validation of group-level or consolidated financial data with direct, real-time visibility into the local or underlying details. Embedded with rich intelligence to automatically draft financial narratives, variance explanations, and executive summaries, finance teams are freed from manual documentation and can focus on strategic guidance instead. 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;

•Account Analysis automatically groups and categorizes individual transactions to help users identify potential exceptions and adjustments, monitor the health of accounts, and proactively mitigate risk;

•Journals Risk Analyser mitigates the risks related to manual journal entries by providing visibility into the entire journal population, and enabling users to proactively monitor key metrics and irregularities with AI-powered anomaly detection, trend analysis, and natural language querying. This allows users to stay ahead of audit issues, and decrease the risk of misstatements;

•Consolidation provides a transparent, business-owned solution to connect data, automate key consolidation activities, and accelerate the delivery of financial statements. The solution automates intercompany eliminations, top-side adjustments, and currency translations, while allowing for flexible management of consolidation methods and exchange rates. By unifying data from multiple entities and ERPs, it ensures results are complete and accurate with integrated mapping, adjustment automation, and drill-down capabilities for end-to-end transparency and control; and

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

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Record-to-Report - Intercompany

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, and have direct and indirect tax and transfer pricing risk, as well as imbalances that must be resolved before impacting reported financials. The intricate nature of intercompany transactions often drives accounting, tax, and treasury 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 or addressing upstream issues, operational challenges, weak control and governance environments, or intercompany journals. This prevalent operational practice results in heightened stress and risk for accounting and finance professionals, stemming from an unproductive, low value-add 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 balancing, disputes management, resolution, and settlement processes. 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 through an automated and rules-driven process that uses billing routes to facilitate the flow of transactions 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, and that billing is conducted in a manner that optimizes process efficiency and minimizes tax leakage. Transactions are booked directly into the general ledger via Journals. Invoices are automatically generated for each respective jurisdiction, and e-invoicing capabilities can send intercompany data to country-specific portals. Workflow capabilities exist for key control governance, ad hoc transaction management, and non-invoiceable transactions;

•Intercompany Balance & Resolve centralizes, streamlines, and automates complex intercompany reconciliations and dispute management processes by capturing all intercompany transactions within the virtual subledger and providing automated corrective or other resolution actions to govern reconciliation. This feature reduces intercompany reconciliation risk through both detective and preventative controls, eliminates manual reconciliation and dispute management effort, and reduces last-minute fixes by automatically flagging out-of-balance trading pairs and underlying transactions. Open intercompany transactions are continually analyzed to verify offsetting transactions on the respective trading partner books under our concept of ‘continuous intercompany accounting.’ 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; and

•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 how intercompany balances are closed out using cash and non-cash settlement methodologies to manage each entity's cash position. Users can filter the information by transaction type, hold type, currency, or business relationship. This feature facilitates netting transactions and cash reporting, and it helps treasury teams and controllers make informed, strategic decisions while managing cash, full-time equivalent positions, 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.

•Electronic Invoicing & Payments 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 Electronic Invoicing & Compliance enables customers to adapt to, and comply with, country-specific requirements amid evolving e-invoicing regulations across countries;

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•Cash Application transforms the order-to-cash process 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, end-to-end process using intelligent automation to help customers accurately apply payment receipts in the bank to customers’ invoices in an ERP. Embedded machine learning reduces the manual effort involved in the process and releases working capital for our customers by underpinning accurate collection strategies downstream;

•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 data, to understand the historical indebtedness and behavior trends of the companies with whom our customers trade. 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 and revenue. Disputes & Deductions logs, monitors, and analyzes invoice disputes and provides our customers with 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; and

•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.

Services

Customer service is essential to our customers' success, and we are focused on driving long-term partnership and value by offering the following services:

•Implementation: With a focus on configuration, a typical project will draw on our expertise from over 5,200 implementations to deliver proven, industry-specific process designs. For optimal product adoption, along with accelerated time to value, BlackLine is augmenting existing implementation efforts with agentic elements, which facilitates a seamless and efficient onboarding journey. 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 rather than 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, so that every customer has a superior implementation experience;

•Optimization: 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;

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•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 record-to-report and invoice-to-cash;

•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; and

•Global Support: From our offices in Australia, England, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Romania, and the United States (“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. We also offer additional tiers of support that customers can purchase based on their needs with benefits such as prioritized routing and more personalized support.

Across our platform, products, and services, BlackLine stands out through its integration, scalability, flexibility, ease of use, and commitment to innovation. Our solutions securely and automatically connect with ERPs and various financial data sources, simplifying data consolidation for complex environments. Unlike solutions tied to specific systems, BlackLine is ERP and data source-agnostic, ensuring compatibility and adaptability as organizations evolve. Designed by finance and accounting professionals with years of industry experience, our user-friendly interface offers intuitive dashboards, collaboration tools, and streamlined workflows for all skill levels. With a history of proven innovation and a commitment to continued investment, BlackLine continues to address more challenges across the Office of the CFO, meeting the diverse and dynamic needs of today’s businesses.

Key Benefits

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

•Automated Processes for Greater Speed & Efficiency: Our solutions leverage AI and automation to streamline manual finance and accounting activities such as reconciliations, journal entries, and cash application. By seamlessly integrating with ERP systems and other data sources, our solutions eliminate manual work, prevent errors, and free up teams to focus on strategic activities;

•Holistic Financial Operations Management: Our Studio360 platform provides a unified environment for the Office of the CFO by integrating data, orchestrating end-to-end workflows across disparate systems, and AI-powered visibility. This empowers teams to move beyond individual tasks and manage the entire financial process with greater control, efficiency, and strategic insight;

•Strengthened Controls & Improved Compliance: By embedding controls, segregation of duties, out-of-the-box workflows, and audit trails across our platform and applications, we help organizations address the complexities of their global regulatory requirements and reduce the risk of non-compliance. Our ability to scale across multiple currencies, languages, and unify financial data across sources ensures accuracy and greater confidence in financial reporting;

•Reduced Costs: Our solutions replace resource-intensive, often spreadsheet-based processes with automated workflows and leading practices, leading to cost savings. Our platform’s extensibility, flexibility, and scalability enable enterprises to optimize their financial operations, reducing bottlenecks and delivering value across diverse organizational setups, including those managing high transaction volumes;

•Maximizing Working Capital: Our unified invoice-to-cash suite maximizes working capital to fund strategic initiatives and support business growth. By creating more efficient and transparent payment processes, our solutions help improve customer relationships and satisfaction;

•Accelerated Insights: Our platform and solutions provide real-time dashboards, configurable reports with drilldown capabilities, and unparalleled visibility into financial data and operations, empowering teams to make informed decisions faster and support improved forecasting; and

•Proactive Anomaly & Risk Detection: Powerful business rules and AI-driven anomaly detection help customers identify potential risks or unusual patterns in their financial operations and results. We enable a proactive approach that prevents issues from escalating, safeguarding financial integrity.

By combining automation, real-time insights, embedded controls, and a flexible, scalable design, our solutions ensure that organizations can meet the increasing demands on the Office of the CFO, despite system complexity

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and an evolving regulatory landscape. Our future-ready platform enables financial operations excellence and empowers the Office of the CFO to deliver strategic value to their organizations.

Customers

Our customers include multinational corporations, large enterprises, mid-size companies, and public sector entities across a broad array of industries. These businesses include publicly-listed entities, privately-owned enterprises, and non-profit entities. At December 31, 2025, we had 4,394 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.

Sales and Marketing

We sell our solutions through our direct sales force. Our direct sales force leverages relationships with technology vendors, such as Workday, SAP, and Microsoft, professional services firms, such as Accenture, Deloitte, and Ernst & Young, and business process outsourcers, such as CapGemini, GenPact, and RSM 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 SAP solutions-extensions (“SolEx”), for which we receive a percentage of the revenues. SolEx allows us to provide the highest level integration with SAP ERP solutions. We continue to be a partner-powered organization, harnessing the deep and embedded relationships our partners have with key decision-makers at our customers.

Our marketing efforts focus on demand generation, establishing and extending our brand proposition, driving product awareness, and cultivating our user community. 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 Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), the Chartered Institute of Credit Management (CICM), the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON), the National Association of Credit Management (NACM), the Financial Executives International (FEI), the Association of Governments Accountants (AGA), the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA), and the Society of Defense Financial Management (SDFM).

Competition

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

We compete with vendors of financial operations, financial automation, record-to-report, and invoice-to-cash software, including software offered by certain ERP vendors, and a growing number of AI-native automation platforms. 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:

•AI capabilities and roadmap;

•security, data privacy, and protection;

•auditability, chain of thought, and transparency;

•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 and finance best practices;

•ability to innovate and respond to customer needs rapidly;

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•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 1,850 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, and Serve.

Through a focus on 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 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 to join our team because we believe that fostering an inclusive environment better positions us to recruit strong talent and unlock innovation. We focus on building an inclusive culture through a variety of company initiatives, beginning with our hiring practices and our commitment to continually attract candidates from a broad range of backgrounds into our recruiting pipeline.

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.

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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 competitive. 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 stockholders. 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.