Case Study: Australia Post achieves a two-day month-end close and $1M savings with BlackLine

Australia Post Accounting Team Delivers Results with Automation & Controls

Australia Post, the government-owned postal and logistics provider with more than 35,000 employees, $6.8 billion in annual revenue and thousands of subsidiaries and accounts, faced a slow, manual finance close process and limited visibility and controls across reconciliations. Reconciling hundreds of bank and GL accounts in spreadsheets left the team with long closes (up to 15 days), high volumes of aged items and significant manual effort.

Starting in 2014 they rolled out BlackLine Account Reconciliations and Transaction Matching to automate reconciliations and high-volume matching (now ~750 reconciliations and ~500,000 matches monthly). The program cut month‑end close time for transactional accounts to two days, reduced accounts with 90+ day items from ~50% to 1%, improved receipt-to-invoice allocation to 80% (a 50% uplift), delivered unit cost savings of ~30% and about $1M in savings over three years, and shrank annual balance-sheet audits from more than two weeks to under one week.

Australia Post

Catherine Phan

Senior Manager, General Accounting