Case Study: Scotts Miracle-Gro achieves automated, SOX-compliant account reconciliations and major time and paper savings with BlackLine

Scotts Miracle-Gro - Customer Case Study

The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, a $3B global leader in consumer lawn and garden products, was struggling with a sprawling, spreadsheet-based reconciliation process across its single SAP ERP instance (2,000–4,700 accounts) and about 150 finance staff. Inconsistent practices, hard-to-find supporting documentation and increasing SOX-audit scrutiny made reconciliing balance sheets time-consuming, error-prone and inefficient.

Scotts implemented BlackLine’s Account Reconciliations, Task Management and Journal Entry integrated with SAP, standardizing templates, approval hierarchies, roles and rulesets and enabling auto-certification. The program automated reconciliation for thousands of accounts (auto-certifying 1,000+), streamlined hundreds of monthly/quarterly/annual tasks, automated ~1,100 journals, eliminated paper filings, sped audits and increased control, visibility and confidence in reported numbers.

Scotts Miracle-Gro

Laurel Johns

Manager of Finance Consolidation and Controls