By Kivanc Pakel, Global Managing Director, Intercompany at BlackLine
For complex, multinational organisations, optimising intercompany reconciliation is crucial not just for Finance and Accounting (F&A), but for the entire Office of the CFO—including Treasury, Tax, and beyond. Effective intercompany financial management (IFM) directly impacts corporate performance, cash flow, and compliance, making it a high priority for CFOs looking to drive value across the enterprise. As many CFOs recognise, automating intercompany processes and mastering Intercompany Financial Management (IFM) can save time, reduce tax leakage, and free up working capital – not only speeding up the close process but allowing teams to set aside mundane tasks in favour of more strategic, impactful work.
However, the greatest challenge often lies in overcoming organisational resistance to change. Many multinational organisations frequently default to temporary ‘quick fix’ solutions when it comes to their intercompany reconciliations – without looking at the bigger picture -missing the broader efforts of full-scale optimisation.
Navigating the Change Journey
For CFOs to lead successful intercompany transformations, a structured and strategic approach is essential. A comprehensive roadmap must be developed to address both operational pain points and organisational resistance, ensuring stakeholder buy-in and alignment across functions.
Additionally, CFOs should seek out a partner whose approach to digital transformation is proven, collaborative, and achievable, ensuring the process is both realistic and aligned with the organisation’s long-term goals.
Creating an Intercompany Roadmap
The first step is to conduct an in-depth impact assessment of current, unoptimized intercompany processes. This assessment should clearly highlight inefficiencies and quantify the potential gains from transformation—whether in reduced tax exposure, enhanced cash flow, or streamlined operations. By defining the “why” behind the change, CFOs can craft a compelling narrative that aligns with broader organisational goals and objectives.
This vision can then be adapted into a detailed execution roadmap that aligns and is tailored to your leadership’s expectations – informing an evidence-based approach to showing how the organisation can move forward. With the aid of this impact assessment and roadmap, you have the tools ready to present and gain stakeholder support for your intercompany transformation.
Building a Dedicated Optimisation Team
Implementing an intercompany optimisation initiative requires assembling a cross-functional team that spans the Office of the CFO. This team should include key players such as global process owners (GPOs), treasury and tax leaders, change champions, and external partners. Engaging a partner with a proven, collaborative approach ensures actionable solutions while simplifying and automating complex intercompany processes.
Of course, ensuring consistent communication with stakeholders throughout this entire process is critical to maintaining support from leadership. CFOs must articulate how automation will simplify teams’ work, improve data accuracy, and enhance decision-making capabilities.
Embedding Best Practices in Intercompany Accounting
Intercompany processes, particularly those involving complex, unbalanced transactions, can drain time and resources across F&A and other corporate functions. To ensure sustainable success, CFOs should embed best practices that automate and streamline as many processes as possible. Therefore, in order to ensure continued success in intercompany accounting, leaders in the office of the CFO should aim to move forward with the best possible practices – including automating and simplifying as many areas as possible. Implementing intuitive automation solutions that streamline existing processes, as well as training teams to understand, troubleshoot and educate on a new system is critical.
Intuitive automation solutions are key to optimising these processes, from exception handling to top-side adjustments. Balancing intercompany postings, automating the clearance of exchange rate gains and losses, and standardising documentation practices are essential steps. Implementing automated netting and settlement processes, along with robust elimination procedures, will further reduce manual effort and increase efficiency.
Intercompany transactional volumes are typically very high compared to external revenues and companies do not read the data to measure their process efficiencies at all. However, with the help of AI/ML, we at BlackLine are able to offer critical insights over intercompany data sets and provide businesses with the tools they need to drive growth.
Achievable & Collaborative Transformation
For success, intercompany best practices could be part of an integrated process that connects all areas of the business. The more streamlined and accessible the process, the more likely it is that teams will embrace the change—leading to smoother implementations and lasting improvements.
By creating a clear impact assessment, a robust roadmap, assembling your team and securing stakeholder support – CFOs can guide their organisation through a successful intercompany optimisation journey. Finding a partner with a proven track record ensures that each step of this journey is achievable and backed by real-world success. Informing stakeholders of the advantages of optimisation can help them to understand the rationale behind the move and how it impacts their work, ensuring buy-in and lessening internal resistance to change. This approach guarantees a “win-win” situation – paving the way for a seamless implementation of intercompany optimisation, which will provide end benefits to all corners of an organisation.