Case Study: Under Armour achieves a faster, automated financial close and real-time reconciliations with BlackLine

Under Armour Gears Up for an Automated Financial Close

Under Armour, the performance apparel company founded by Kevin Plank, was growing rapidly—expanding into footwear, direct-to-consumer and connected fitness through several acquisitions—and found its month-end close processes could no longer scale. Account reconciliations and journal approvals were handled with paper binders and manual sign-offs across global offices, creating poor visibility, control risks, duplicated effort and lengthy audit support.

Under Armour implemented BlackLine’s cloud-based Financial Close Suite integrated with SAP, rolling out Account Reconciliations, Task Management and Journal Entry to automate GL extracts, approvals and reporting. The change eliminated paper binders, delivered push‑button status reporting and auditor read‑only access, shaved several business days off the close, freed staff to focus on analysis rather than admin, improved SOX controls and global visibility, and now supports roughly 100 users and some 170 task-based controls.

Under Armour

Molly E. Boyle

Senior Manager of Corporate Accounting