Case Study: Discovery Channel achieves stronger global financial controls and faster closes with BlackLine

Media Company Improves Controls and Oversight Across a Global Deployment

Discovery, Inc., a global media company formed after its 2018 acquisition of Scripps, needed stronger financial controls and governance across a fast-growing, multi-country SAP environment. With accounting activities spread across more than 20 countries, manual account reconciliations and a journal-entry control deficiency left the company exposed and created inefficiencies for internal and external auditors.

Discovery partnered with SandPoint to deploy BlackLine’s Account Reconciliations, Journal Entry, and Task Management solutions integrated with SAP in a phased rollout. The implementation centralized reconciliation practices, enforced policy-driven templates and approvals (including pre-posting journal approvals), and introduced risk-based scheduling, resulting in eliminated control deficiencies, improved audit efficiency and visibility, and an on-time, under-budget deployment supporting roughly 275–300 users.

Discovery Channel

Kara Hartnett

Director of Corporate Accounting