Hello everyone, and welcome to BlackLine's 2021 Investor Day. My name is Alex Geller, and I'm the VP of Investor Relations. Thank you all for joining us today. We have an informative half day ahead, and we're excited to introduce you to some of our newest additions to the leadership team. Looking to the agenda, we're going to start with Marc Huffman, CEO, who's going to do an overview of BlackLine, a deep dive into our buyer, and the problems we are solving for them. Next, Pete Hirsch, CTO, will outline our product strategy and our commitment to product innovation. Next, we're going to show you a demo of the BlackLine Accounting Cloud, so you can get a first-hand view of the top modern accounting use cases of the BlackLine platform. After that, we will have a short 10-minute break, then we'll resume with our go-to-market team.
You will hear from Mark Woodhams, our recently promoted Chief Revenue Officer, as well as new hires such as Mel Zeledon, SVP of Channels and Alliances, and Kevin Kimber, Managing Director of Global Accounts Receivable, as they dive into our strategy to execute and drive long-term growth. To conclude, Mark Partin will share the CFO's perspective on the Office of the Controller, as well as walk you through our financial model. Throughout the day, you will also hear directly from happy BlackLine customers. After the presentations, we will have a second quick five-minute break, and then we will move to a live 45-minute Q&A session with today's presenters. We will save all questions until the Q&A session at the end. As questions arise throughout the day, please use the Q&A widget at the bottom of your screen to submit your questions. Alternatively, you can email your questions to investors@blackline.com.
You'll also be able to ask questions live via the Q&A widget when we are in the Q&A session later today. Should you encounter any technical difficulties, please click on the Help widget at the bottom of your screen as they address the most common technical issues. Often, a simple refresh of your browser will solve many issues. Before we get started, let's review our Safe Harbor Statement. As a reminder, certain statements made during today's presentation that are not historical facts, including those regarding our future plans, objectives, and expected performance, are forward-looking statements and represent our outlook only as of today's date. While we believe any forward-looking statements we have made are reasonable, actual results could differ materially because the statements are based on our current expectations and subject to risks and uncertainties.
You can find reconciliations of our GAAP to non-GAAP results in the appendix of this deck. Today's investor deck will be available on our Investor Relations website at the conclusion of today's presentation. With that, let's get started with our first speaker, Marc Huffman.
Thank you, Alex, and thank you all for joining us today. Welcome to the BlackLine Investor Event. I'm going to start by talking to you about BlackLine and what we believe are the keys to the continued long-term success. For those of you who are new to the BlackLine story, let me provide you an introduction. Our story starts like so many other great software companies, where a need was not being met by existing products or solutions. Our founder, Therese, built it, and by doing so, filled the gap in the financial systems landscape that many accounting organizations have. From this humble beginning, we were able to create a viable and thriving business. From there, we received private funding to help expand our solutions, to address other gaps in the financial and accounting close processes, and to further the growth and the strength of our business.
We then added experienced leaders and professionals who were able to grow our business to a size and capability to successfully take BlackLine public in 2016. Since my arrival three years ago, Therese and I have been focusing on our multi-year growth initiatives to prepare BlackLine for scale. Chief among our efforts was to build out our leadership team with industry experts and to integrate our sales, marketing, and customer operations into a tightly aligned go-to-market team. We have embarked on a strategic relationship with SAP as a solution extension partner, and we are leveraging SAP in our alliance partnerships with EY and Deloitte to create what we call the power of three. Today, BlackLine works with companies of all sizes, including many of the largest and most complex organizations in the world. We have earned the trust and business of 60% of the Fortune 50 and 46% of the Fortune 500.
We have nearly 300,000 users. These are mostly accountants and controllers who use BlackLine on a regular basis to help close their books. BlackLine has enjoyed the benefit of the experience and the feedback from our large user community to create the most compelling solutions for accounting and finance professionals. Our 1,300+ employees are in 15 offices around the globe, and all employees are on a mission to ensure our customers' success. Many of our employees are accountants, and some come to us from customers. There are two reasons why this is important. First, we have deep subject matter expertise built into our very core. Second, many of our employees who were formerly customers know how life-changing our software can be. They come to work as evangelists and living testaments to its powerful results. BlackLine is the pioneer in our space. We created the category of accounting close automation.
However, pioneer is not synonymous with leader. To become and remain the leader in any category requires a mindset of continuous improvement and a dedicated focus on how to best address the customer's needs. Our software solutions are purpose-built for our buyer. We do not sell a generic workflow engine. We sell complete solutions that satisfy our buyer's needs. Our buyer is special. Accountants are required to follow very specific regulations and have their own language and have a unique and nuanced approach to the process of selecting solutions. We've seen other technology companies become attracted to the size of our market only to learn that they don't actually know how to address the needs of the controller or the accountants. We understand the needs of our buyer, and we know how to solve them. We continue to lead this space and have the most brand recognition and loyal customers.
As such, BlackLine has been recognized by Gartner as a leader in the Magic Quadrant from 2016 to 2020 and Gartner's Customer Choice Award in 2020. Now that you know a bit about BlackLine, let's talk about our vision. We want to be the most indispensable platform for the corporate controller. Let's first dive into who the corporate controller is, what their responsibilities are, and how BlackLine can truly enable them and their teams to be more accurate, more effective, and cost less. Let's start with a controller's role. In some organizations, this may be synonymous with the Chief Accounting Officer. If you've never worked in accounting, you might have no idea what a controller actually does. The role of the controller is to oversee all of the accounting-related functions. These can include the general ledger, payroll, accounts payable, accounts receivable, billing, reporting, and regulatory and compliance activities.
Each function has its own team, its own systems that its team members use on a daily basis, and its own processes. The Corporate Controller is responsible for a complex and sometimes large organization spread across many countries, using a wide range of systems and working on tight timelines that cannot be changed. The penalties for failure are high. This is our buyer's predicament. They are unique and complex. BlackLine has proven ability as an effective and desirable solution to help solve many of the Controller's problems. Now, these accounting functions may have different names and be organized differently from one company to another, but do not let that fool you. They should operate as one interconnected function with each team co-dependent on one another. A mistake made by one team will impact the whole function.
For an example, if an accountant is holding things up in the commissions area, that's going to impact payroll. Two accountants within the same department in different parts of the world affect one another, whether they know it or not. This is true for most accounting organizations, regardless of industry, size, or location. As you can imagine, a large part of the controller's role is to manage the workload across these many interconnected teams. They have to ensure that numbers are accurate, that teams are operating efficiently, internal controls are operating effectively, and they have to ensure delivery within internal and external deadlines. If all of this is not enough to bring you to your knees, the controller needs to hire, train, and retain experts to get all of this work done on a timely basis.
Finding a vendor with solutions where the corporate controller is confident in their ability to execute is very important. We know this buyer, and the buyer knows us. Typically, the most challenging time for the controller is the period end close, and that can be anywhere from 5 to 15 days or more. Most controllers have teams spending 100% of their time on close-related tasks, checklists, entry adjustments, reconciliations, and variance analysis. The typical controller hasn't had the budget, bandwidth, or the resources to create effective processes. What they are doing is not sustainable. On this slide, you can see the real workflows that companies undergoing a manual close have to work through, and you can clearly see that these processes are not optimized. Their whole team is racing to get it done, and it's chaotic, and it's on a deadline.
At some point in time, the pencils go down, and the controller begins the next step of processes: review, adjustments, audit, audit committee, earnings, and public filings. This is when the overtime kicks in for the controller because they have to review all of the detail their departments have pulled together. Some controllers will get this information in a stack of binders, each one inches thick. Controllers who aren't using paper binders will be using shared file servers, hard drives, and email, each of which has its own set of challenges and limitations. Regardless of the delivery vehicle, this data package starts with a trial balance that lists out all of the accounts and their ending balances. Behind that is every individual account reconciliation, and behind that is the supporting detail for each individual reconciliation.
This data package requires a detailed review, and as you can imagine, that is very time-consuming and manual. What if there's an error in a spreadsheet? Or what happens if someone books a journal entry after the controller has received their data package? If there's an error or a late entry, these issues often arise. There will be downstream impacts with multiple updates across multiple items before the controller can resume the review process. Let me help to define the level of complexity and volume that the controller is dealing with at a large enterprise. A typical chart of accounts for a global manufacturing company, as an example, could have 2,000 natural accounts. This amount times the number of entities of, say, 200 subsidiaries means that there are somewhere around 400,000 accounts globally, and a good portion needs to be reviewed and closed each month.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The really big volumes occur once you start looking at the transactions in each of the accounts and further adding in subledger activity like accounts payable, accounts receivable, and payroll. This process is time-consuming. It lacks visibility and often conflicts with important deadlines. Yet, this is the way it is for most controllers today. I'm going to say that again so it really sinks in. This cycle of manual processes and information being shared in binders, shared drives, and emails is still the status quo for most controllers today. Once the controller has completed their review, the process now moves to the auditor to form their independent opinion on the completeness and accuracy of the financial statements. It's important to note that for a manual process, the auditors have to wait on the controller before they can begin their review.
This labor-intensive and manual review process now transfers to the auditor, and they have their own set of regulations and standards that typically generate additional rounds of back and forth between different accounting departments and ultimately the controller and the auditor. This is a bad process. It was unsustainable and risky before COVID, but now it's impossible. Since this process takes so much of a controller's time, they often don't get to focus on the other important areas of their role that are strategic to the broader organization. One example is around systems and information. Everything that happens upstream in an organization, all of the systems and processes outside of accounting ultimately make their way downstream into the accounting department where the numbers get reported.
Today's controllers have to partner across all departments, from sales to legal to IT, to identify the right systems and processes for the company to put in place so the controller and their team can report accurate financials. This can have serious ramifications if done incorrectly. As you can see, traditional accounting is not sustainable. The controller often lives in a chaotic environment that is dominated by manual processes and significant constraints. This environment is behind the times, and the controller has not been particularly motivated to change, not only because they don't get budget, but also because change creates risk. The controller is prescriptive. They need to prove out value, and the last thing a controller wants to undertake is anything that could potentially generate more risk. Here is one example that we have observed, which we call horse blinders or Sally, same as the last year.
That is when someone who is probably no longer with the organization set down a policy or a process that is now stale and adds no value. The current team continues blindly to follow this process. This leads to organizational entropy and furthers the need for financial transformation. Often, this aversion to risk will prevent a controller from moving to modern accounting, and it's the reason why even today our biggest competition is the status quo, doing nothing. This brings me to one of BlackLine's strengths. BlackLine was purpose-built for accountants, by accountants, and we have worked with thousands of controllers around the world across industries to identify leading practices to solve their problems, reduce complexity, and ensure accuracy. Controllers rely on their peers and the subject matter expertise of their vendors. Controllers trust BlackLine, and they look to BlackLine to help them manage and mitigate their risk.
The pandemic has changed the risk playing field. Status quo and do nothing have become riskier than ever before. For one of our recent Fortune 500 customers, COVID ended up being a big driver in their decision to adopt modern accounting. Once they were forced out of the office in March, they were stuck with a very painful remote close where sign-offs and approvals took place in the parking lot at their headquarters for the first few remote closes. We do not want to see any companies forced to work under such challenging conditions. Let's discuss some of the most significant benefits that BlackLine provides to the controller. First is automation. BlackLine automates the manual work. Automation has been inherent in BlackLine's platform since inception and often provides a compelling ROI and strong justification for prospects to move forward with BlackLine. Second is process and people management.
You just heard me identify how a controller can have a very large team that can span thousands of people. Recall that all of these individuals operate as one interconnected function with each team co-dependent on the other. Controllers using BlackLine can log into the platform and view the dashboard to identify in real time who is ahead, who is behind, and who's struggling. The dashboard replaces the back and forth of in-person conversation, phone calls, chat pings, and email check-ins. This is even more relevant in this work-from-home environment with dispersed team members and email and video meeting fatigue. The data from the dashboard is hugely insightful to keep track of where the team is in the close process and how they are tracking to their deadlines, but that is just the first step.
Using BlackLine, controllers can then dig into what each individual on their team is doing, whether it's identifying a hold-up and digging into the detail and reviewing the data to ensure they are comfortable with how the team is posting a journal entry or approving a reconciliation. This degree of visibility is hugely important because it means the controller no longer has to wait for their team to deliver the data package, which then creates a huge project for them. With BlackLine, the controller is now able to run parallel processes, so reconciliations can start flowing in on day one, and the controller can start chipping away at the data to identify issues earlier and correct them before they impact other functions in the broader close.
At the same time, if an error is identified or if a late journal entry is posted, BlackLine will automatically kick the reconciliation out of the reviewed status and alert the preparer so they can update the reconciliation. This gives the controller complete confidence that the data that they are viewing is up to date and accurate. With BlackLine, the controller has access to this information anytime, anywhere, all in one place. This is because the systems are talking to each other. The ERP and BlackLine are talking to each other, and the controller has a real-time view of what's happening so they can best approach the close and prevent delays. This accessibility streamlines the processes not only for the controller and their team, but also for the auditors so they can access the information they need. For auditors, BlackLine enables a self-service model.
They can log into the system and access the items that are ready for them to review and test. With BlackLine, auditors only see what is ready for them to review. If something has not been reviewed, they cannot yet see it. That accessibility creates an ease of use not only for the controller and their team to get the data to their auditors, but for the auditors to access it on their own. I have just gone into great detail to depict the landscape for the controller, the challenges they face, and how BlackLine generates significant value. I think you might be surprised to know that all of these benefits come from our close process management solution.
This is how we lead into nearly every sale because the benefits are so impactful to organizations regardless of size or industry, and it's the foundation to our large and compelling expansion opportunity. Believe it or not, this is only scratching the surface for the challenges of today's controller. We have a whole host of other products that are truly transformative, as well as an aggressive product roadmap to deepen our product offering, which Pete will discuss in more detail today. That is because companies have high volumes of data, millions of lines of data spread across hundreds of sources.
We can take all of that data and bring it into BlackLine so that BlackLine can do all of the data enrichment, the calculations, the concatenations, the lookup tables, and then feed that data into the different processes, whether it's a matching process, a reconciliation process, a journal entry, or some sort of analysis. With the BlackLine Accounting Cloud, we're automating manual work and optimizing the accounting process itself. This is what modern accounting is all about: taking our expertise to create an experience that is unified, automated, and continuous. Unifying a company's systems and data for a single source of truth so controllers can standardize and control their processes for consistency, efficiency, and visibility. Automation is the way to shield organizations from disruption. Manual repetitive activities drain time and energy from the controller and their team.
Automation of manual activities gives them that time and energy to spend on higher value activities such as analysis, investigating exceptions and variances, and business partnering. Of course, continuity. This pandemic has taught us that business resilience depends on reacting in real time, in hours or days, not weeks and months. The expectations for accounting have changed, and companies need data as it happens. BlackLine enables business agility so accounting departments can execute accounting continuously, and controllers can guide their business in real time. With BlackLine, the controller can collaborate with all of their key stakeholders across all areas of the accounting department within control and visibility at their fingertips. I know controllers well, having worked most of my career at NetSuite and Oracle before the last three years at BlackLine, but don't take my word for it.
Let's hear directly from a controller who has been a BlackLine customer for six years. They are also a joint Remilia Cash Application customer.
Centene is a healthcare services company. We want to improve care in every setting: one product, one partner, and one patient at a time. We touch the lives of patients virtually in every aspect of healthcare. We have approximately 200 people on my team alone, and then we deal and interact with many other groups within Centene. It's a very broad group of people that BlackLine touches. I'm responsible for basically leading the efforts around transforming our finance function. We have individual BU controllers for our large BU function. We're responsible for the majority of the monthly close process. We support numerous legal entities in our North America business. We're having to lead a lot more, I would say, transformation efforts, right?
We're having to be more efficient, finding tools to do our day-to-day jobs so that really we can help the business focus on driving initiatives, being more strategic. Really, it's being a partner with our business leaders and supporting them in that way, not just this kind of back office function that we used to be. We've been on a transformation journey for the last couple of years where the company really has some strong growth initiatives and strategies, and in order to be able to accomplish that, we needed to free up resources. Automation and technology are really viewed as an enabler to do that. We started looking at BlackLine because we're also on multiple ERP systems, and just trying to bring everything together in a more standardized way was what we were looking to do.
We used a lot of Excel spreadsheets, so it was a very just generally manual process. I mentioned the multiple ERP systems and wanting to standardize. BlackLine was a tool that could work with those different systems and, I guess, sit on top of the systems the way I think about it. It's a bit agnostic on what your ERP platform is, and I think that was one of the most appealing things to us. We've got a better overall picture of what our close process looks like. We felt like the task module was really helpful to help bring all those multiple checklists that I mentioned together in a kind of concise way.
I think also knowing that eventually we're not quite there yet, but eventually looking at some of the other modules that BlackLine had to offer and bring it all together and streamline it, that was what really appealed to us as we looked at that. We adopted, actually, BlackLine or implemented BlackLine several years ago. We've now rolled that out to all of North America. We have plans to use the reconciliations and the task module in also Europe. That's getting implemented as we speak. The other thing that we did when we took a look at how we could better standardize and utilize BlackLine was to bring in the matching module.
It's just really brought us some efficiencies, and we've become more effective at, I guess, the day-to-day and finding more pockets of time in our day by using some of the tools that exist within BlackLine to help us make decisions on where can we focus our attention, what's the risk, that type of thing. We did recently roll out using the cash application tool, and we plan to broaden that rollout to more entities over the next few months. It's really interesting, frankly, to see those two tools come together. I know with BlackLine being such an important part of our financial reporting cycle and close cycle, having this other piece of the module or tool opportunity to grow that relationship and that use of BlackLine is really—I look forward to seeing what else we can do with it.
This has really helped me do a lot of more time, I guess, for the things that I need to focus on: partnering better with our different business leaders, having more time, frankly, to be more strategic, think about what's next in our journey, what does the future look like, where can we add value to our business partners, not just focusing on the day-to-day, but where can we find insight. Specifically to me, my time has changed with being able to be more forward-looking and not just dealing with the day-to-day. I've got that comfort level that the day-to-day has covered. We actually just completed the design phase of implementing our next module, the Journal Entry module. We're very excited about what benefits that can bring to us: more automation, more standardization, and just really taking it to that next level.
We also have been looking at opportunities to focus more, I guess, on a quarterly basis with our results and not be so tied to some of the monthly activities that are timing-based and things like that. We really think that BlackLine journals can help us do some of that. The other area that we've looked at is the Intercompany Hub module. We've got our eye on that next. I think there's a lot of value that can bring to us too. I've mentioned a couple of different times, but the multiple different ERP systems we deal with and trying to reconcile and deal with all of that intercompany activity, it can be quite manual also. Trying to move away from that, I can see that being a really good next step for us. BlackLine really was a big enabler with us moving remotely.
I think having everything in one platform and having the tasks and the monthly close processes within a tool that we could look to and have available for reporting and whatnot, it really helped us when we were looking at ways to shift work. When we had some people who were not quite up and running in a remote situation and others that could pick up the work, we were able to shift things easier because we had easy reporting to know what those tasks were. I think that really played a big role in the last year. It has been a really good journey. BlackLine is a really important partner with us, and I think I only see great things to come as we continue our journey that I talked about and adding more modules, learning more about what we can do to partner together in the future.
It's been a great ride so far, so I look forward to more of that.
That was great to hear from Noel in the Centene. Her story is similar to that of many of our customers. That is, they were working in Excel and email, which is time-consuming and not sustainable. They have a plethora of systems and processes that need to work together, and they need expert help to solve these problems. With BlackLine, Noel has already benefited significantly from finance transformation, and now she is able to attend to more value-added activities, such as driving strategic initiatives in the Centene. As much as Noel and the Centene have experienced great progress on their journey, there are still other areas where BlackLine can help.
As Noel mentioned, they are planning to or already implementing new solutions, including cash application, transaction matching, and journals, and continuing to optimize and automate manual processes to advance their modern accounting journey. This phased approach yields measurable results. A December 2020 report from Nucleus Research exploring customer ROI found that BlackLine solutions generated $2.77 for every dollar invested by a customer in our technology. As BlackLine provides a modern accounting platform for businesses to centralize and automate all financial activities, companies that invest heavily upfront and take a phased approach to their deployments typically achieve the highest customer ROI. By now, you should be familiar with who the controller is, the critical role they play in an organization's financial health, and why so many of them have yet to make the move to modern accounting.
While so many other parts of an organization have benefited from digital transformation, accounting is too often still getting the job done with the same tools and technology that survived Y2K. The pandemic has accelerated the worldwide economy's structural shift to modern software and puts a spotlight on the back office as an area of significant underinvestment. We believe this is our first real investment cycle in our space, and it's being directed by leaders of the C-suite. Nearly 20 years in, this investment cycle is long overdue and a catalyst that we believe will drive long-term growth for BlackLine. We saw the beginning stages of that investment cycle reflected in an improving demand environment throughout 2020, and we believe that demand will continue and possibly even accelerate as the broader economy recovers. Now, let's discuss our strategy to capitalize on these favorable market dynamics.
Coming off a strong end to 2020, we saw continued demand for our offering throughout the pandemic. We have a number of key initiatives we would like to highlight with you. We will observe them throughout 2021, but they are multi-year initiatives to provide fuel for future growth of our business. Our key initiatives include, first, go-to-market execution; second, customer success; and third, investment in product and engineering. It is our opinion that to be successful as a SaaS provider, one must break down the traditional barriers between sales, marketing, and customer operations and operate as one team. I learned this during my time at NetSuite, and we've embraced it at BlackLine. This notion of one team at BlackLine is primal, and we've created decision tools and methods to accommodate this approach throughout our go-to-market team.
This has improved our execution and will continue to do so as we scale the size and complexity of our business. For those of you who are familiar with BlackLine, you know that customer success is our creed and culture. There's no status quo when it comes to our customer success. We are always working to improve the customer experience, increase the value of our solutions, help customers when they are hurting, and celebrate with them when they are winning. We've innovated in this area of our business with initiatives like our strategic innovations team led by Tammy Coley, who works with our Fortune 500 customers on defining success and then creating a roadmap to get there. The investment in product and engineering is key to our success. You will hear more from Pete about this today, but let me outline our approach.
We have a clear vision to lead finance and accounting through a strategic transformation worldwide and to be the most indispensable platform for the controller. Managing the financial close is an important part of this, but we are innovating for the controller in three distinct ways. First is existing product enhancements. We are investing development resources to rapidly advance our platform functionality. Our new product, Account Analysis, is just one of many enhancements we're announcing this year to further innovate on our existing products and deepen their value proposition. Second is product adjacencies. We are committed to expanding our solution to bring end-to-end optimization and automation to other accounting areas that touch the controller. We most recently expanded our platform into the adjacent area of accounts receivable automation.
Cash is king, particularly in this environment, and you will hear more about our cash application product, the AR automation market, and our opportunity from Kevin Kimber later today. Third is platform modernization. We have made continued progress on our migration to the public cloud. This is a multi-year journey, and we are investing in Google Cloud to modernize our platform and provide scalability so we can stay ahead of our customers and their growing business needs and build out new platform services. We believe that our existing TAM is large and can be expanded significantly with our strategy of expanding our new product capabilities, building new solutions, and entering adjacent markets. With a $28 billion TAM, our space has a great opportunity for growth. With expansion into new adjacencies such as Remilia and the AR automation space, we've increased our TAM by an estimated $10 billion.
How are we going to take advantage of that large TAM? We have a great and seasoned go-to-market team. You're going to hear from them today as they dive into our strategy to execute and drive long-term growth. We continue to retain our key employees and increase the overall tenure of our organization while at the same time expanding organically and through acquisition. Now, let's talk about the executive team that's going to get us there. We're here in this moment with the leaders that can pull this off because of the team that Therese and I have built over the last couple of years. We have capable incumbents, and we've been adding horsepower to the team. I am confident in the skills and experience of each member of our executive team. They bring many years of industry and functional expertise.
With the combination of our seasoned executive team and our culture, we have progressed towards the next level of our organizational competence, and this will fuel future growth. Let me finish by saying that I have large aspirations for BlackLine. I believe that the category leader in our space should be at least a billion-dollar company. We are planning to be that category leader. Now, let me turn it over to our CTO, Pete Hirsch, to talk more about our product vision and our strategy.
Thank you, Marc. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. My name is Pete Hirsch, and I'm the Chief Technology Officer for BlackLine. I lead our product and technology organizations, including product management, engineering, cloud, and data centers, and our corporate IT.
I've been with the company for a little over two years and was brought in to expand our technology vision, to build our capabilities, and to take our platform to the next level. Since then, we've accomplished a lot, and I'm excited to give you an update on what we've done and where we're going. Let's start with a view of the foundation we now have in place used by some of the world's largest companies. It starts with a pure cloud SaaS architecture. On top of that, we have a single version of our financial close software deployed for all customers. We have releases four times a year, and all customers are upgraded to the same version and at the same time. Few other SaaS companies can claim this.
What this means is that we spend less time on supporting and maintaining old versions and more time on innovating and providing value for our customers. We're also proud of our uptime, which continues to exceed four nines of availability, which we share publicly on our trust website. We maintain industry-leading security certifications and standards, including SOC 1, 2, and 3, and the highest ISO standards available, including not only 27001 and 27002, but last year, we also achieved 27017 certification. Few other SaaS companies beside the largest in the industry have attained this level. Last year, we processed 10 billion transactions, and that number is growing rapidly with several of our customers ranking in the Fortune 10, representing the largest transaction volumes in the world.
We wrote back over 230 million journal lines to customer ERPs, more than a 100% increase from the 101 million that I talked about at our last investor day. Our product vision is to drive the future of finance and accounting. We want to invert the ERP-centric ecosystem to make the modern accounting platform the most indispensable platform for the controllership. The opportunity for such a role is clear when considering the problems that enterprises face today. First, reliance on multiple ERPs within an enterprise, often of different providers and versions. Antiquated user interfaces with static and hard-coded workloads, batch-oriented and manual processes that fail to scale or keep pace. Globally distributed data and master data lacking central controls, and reliance on a scattered landscape of point solutions and tools to stitch together solutions. These problems create significant challenges for many companies.
We believe BlackLine's centrality in the financial close process for the world's largest enterprises positions us well to address these challenges. We want to empower finance and accounting teams with centralized and intelligent automation that frees them up to focus on judgment and policy rather than routine and mind-numbing transaction processing. This is especially important for today's remote work. Today's accounting processes do not scale and are not sustainable without this level of automation and intelligence. This level of automation provides consistency, financial integrity, and scalability that the controllership requires in today's world. We see an opportunity to take our dominance in the financial close market that we created beyond other accounting processes, such as accounts receivables and cash management. This is just the start, though.
We sit in a very unique place within the ERP landscape where we surround it and can provide a tailored global accounting platform for the controllership. As a reminder, we are ERP neutral, so there's a large opportunity to cement our position as the global platform for digital accounting. Digital accounting is the intelligent, automated foundation and workflows that customers build to model and run their businesses on. It gives businesses the tools and visibility for tracking information and making decisions without getting lost in the detail so they can see the big picture, so they can focus on the things that matter to the business the most.
We think we have a unique opportunity here, so we're investing heavily in several areas, from our team to a migration of the public cloud on GCP to opening our platform to functional innovation to our end-user experience and to expanding our set of solutions beyond the close to AR automation. 2020 was a year none of us would want to repeat, but on the other hand, BlackLine accomplished a lot that we're proud of. I wanted to start with a look back at how we invested in R&D last year and what we were able to accomplish. We continued to invest at full steam in our product and technology organization. We invested heavily in spite of COVID. We made a point of continuing to invest in R&D at full speed. What did BlackLine get for that investment? I'm excited to show you.
It starts with a 44% growth of our organic R&D capacity from a sheer headcount point of view before adding an incremental headcount from the Remilia acquisition. We hired over 100 new employees in product and tech last year. That included several experienced executives in product and engineering and many other senior and talented leaders. It also included several new architects who are critical to our technology selection and design and 77 individual engineers, product managers, program managers, and other important additions to the team. We also formed new teams in program management, solution management, and data. These teams have all been critical in building new capabilities and in maturing our planning and development processes and extending our investment horizon. That is just the numbers. I want to show you what we've been able to accomplish with this investment.
In our last investor day, I spoke to you about accelerating our innovation. Last year, we achieved a 125% increase in velocity. We measure innovation in story points, which reflects the amount of work we get done building new features and in maintaining our products. 125% is huge since we only increased capacity by 44%. We literally increased our throughput by more than two times. We also extended our product planning horizon and visibility and began publishing a four-quarter roadmap. We introduced portfolio planning and created a three-year plan for each of our products. To do that, we needed to get more efficient with our planning processes and take advantage of the new leadership we've been adding to work smarter. This required a longer-term horizon for our investments, greater architectural planning, and tighter interlock across our product engineering and cloud teams.
This chart shows the number of story points in each of our four releases last year. Note that the Q4 bar is a little shorter than the Q3 bar, only because it had a two-month release cycle instead of a three-month release cycle. We ship our fourth quarter release in October rather than mid-quarter in order to avoid year-end holidays and lockdowns. With that as a foundation, just what did we deliver? First, we delivered an open platform with a new developer portal and modern APIs. This unlocks our capabilities to our customers and partners for deeper integration with our systems. I spoke about this as a big theme last time. We released this in Q4 of last year, and yet about 170 customers and partners have already begun to adopt it.
One global enterprise in the EU is integrating their sales transactions, which are subsequently used in journals to go back to their ERP. A well-known fintech customer has integrated with a bank data aggregation service for their transaction matching and bank reconciliations. Two of the world's largest enterprises in oil and petroleum are moving purchase orders and invoices together with proposed intercompany settlements using BlackLine's reporting APIs for updating their ERP-side sales orders and invoices. These APIs also drive consumption of our data from external services, which in turn drives revenue. We announced a brand new module, Account Analysis. We have more work ahead of us with Account Analysis, but this really raises the bar on account reconciliation by providing critical capabilities in classifying and processing transactions. We also made major progress upgrading our UI and overall user experience.
We created a new visual design and began upgrading pages with new support for WCAG 2.0 accessibility and a new mobile application. Our new UI will be released for all customers later this year, and our customers are very excited about this. We're working closely with them on our new designs. We also released a big update last year to our most trafficked part of the application, our unmatched transaction workspace, to incorporate major improvements in efficiency, analysis, and control. This provides for a more intuitive user experience for end-user transaction-level processing. Another major accomplishment was scaling our transaction throughput for our largest customers. In Q3 of last year, we achieved a new high-water mark for one of our largest journal customers in their Q3 close, with more than 3x the volume compared to what they had been able to handle just two quarters earlier.
This represented almost 1.5 million journal lines posted to their ERP in a single day. This high degree of transaction volume creates compelling ROI for our customers and increases our stickiness. We also invested in enhanced international support for our solutions as we broaden our footprint in more and more countries. We added new support for Japanese customers, which includes not only a translation but also work in the database for how characters and strings are sorted and handled in Kanji. We expanded our team for localizing documentation and training materials. Finally, we made big progress in our Google Cloud migration, passing our SOC certifications with flying colors. Last quarter, we started deploying customers on GCP. We'll be ramping our migrations this year and next. Looking forward to this year, we have three strategic themes we're focusing on.
The first is continued product innovation to drive near-term value for our customers and to grow revenue. This means providing rapid investments and compelling value for our products, including our new AR automation products from Remilia, and creating synergies between them. It includes delivering Account Analysis, support for our customer journey framework and solution selling, and reduced time to value for our existing products. It includes innovating more deeply in some of our more promising products like Intercompany Hub and journals. We will also be introducing major enhancements in our user experience. It includes development of a brand new capability called Finance Automation, which I will be talking more about in a few minutes. The second theme is continuing to stay ahead of our customers, providing functionality, performance, and scale as we modernize our platform.
We see an opportunity to move from tens of millions of transactions per customer per month to billions, to move compute power closer to our customers and users, and to provide more business logic flexibility and more insight to our users. All of this requires the public cloud. As we move to GCP, we're also building out new capabilities in our platform. The third ties to balancing speed with quality and controls for operational excellence. You heard Mark talking about the continued importance of our focus on customer centricity and what it means to serve our customers. We're now serving some of the largest enterprises in the world with several on the Fortune 10. They're putting their trust in BlackLine. Our biggest customers are starting to see us just as they see their ERP providers as foundational for their business.
This gives us an opportunity to move into a more strategic relationship with them. We want to maintain and build on this trust. This extends to the quality of our offerings, our uptime and service delivery, our operational controls, security, responsiveness, and the impact we have on their business. Let's take a closer look at the specific top priority investments for this year. The product theme for our user conference in November was the road to accounting in 2025. What are the big investments we're making to take us there? It starts with account analysis. A big priority for us this year is delivering and building on account analysis. Account analysis raises the bar in the financial close process to the next level, driving visibility and control at the transaction level.
This new module will provide enormous synergies not only with account recs but also with journals, matching, tasks, and compliance, which will drive adoption of these modules. It is also the natural progression in automating the overall close process and will be delivering full automation and exception management before year-end. Account Analysis can be used independently to organize the investigation of outlier activity in any group of transactions, but it also fits as part of a suite of automated reconciliation solutions working together in sequence. For example, if you have a high-volume, high-risk account, then you will probably be using Transaction Matching to reconcile transactions between your general ledger and the supporting systems. Transaction Matching includes rules-based automated matching, but even after the matching, you're still going to be left with some unmatched transactions, and that's where Account Analysis will come in.
Account analysis addresses the next piece of the puzzle, which is analyzing those unmatched transactions in this high-volume and potentially high-risk account. Eventually, we see account analysis broadening beyond reconciliation to other key financial processes and even to business operations. It represents a big market opportunity as well as an opportunity to put more distance between us and the competition. It further drives transaction volume, which in turn drives revenue. Another big investment we're making is in finance automation. This is super exciting. Our vision is to connect and automate the entire financial close process from end to end, leading to a touchless close. We spoke of this briefly at Beyond the Black. This is essentially native, intelligent, and embedded RPA, which spans not only BlackLine solutions but also integrates with external financial and workflow systems and even remotely controls certain ERP functions.
This is inspired by our Smart Close product, which sits on-prem for SAP customers. We are taking this concept to the next level and building it in the cloud for all ERPs. Finance and accounting teams will have a central cockpit for a broad workflow of intelligent, automated tasks and processes. Our vision is that finance automation will serve as the central nervous system for work with events and notifications and automated processes. We are still early in this project, but we are super excited about it. We completed our planning and early design last year, and we start building it out this year. Stay tuned to hear more. Of course, AR automation will be a big focus for us this year as well. We have some clear goals beginning with supporting accelerated growth in our cash application product.
We've also started the work on integrating our financial close and AR suites for enhanced cash management. We're planning to integrate the cash application with our account recs and our matching solution so that our existing customers can now leverage the benefits of AR automation. This helps us on our journey of continuous accounting as customers can now accelerate their financial close by having payments cleared down daily without waiting until the close. We plan to share the integration roadmap with our customers soon. The team is also in the final phases of delivering a new analytical product to market called AR Intelligence, which is a natural complement to cash application. We're excited about this product not only for what it does for cash, though, but also for the synergies tying cash forecasting back to our financial close suite for intercurrency adjustments, intercompany cash, bad debt reserves, and suspense accounts.
Of course, modernizing our platform is critical for supporting all this new functionality. It starts with GCP and the migration of our customers, but that's only the first step. We plan to leverage the public cloud, building out our new platform services. Our goal is massive platform scalability. Last year, we ingested about 10 billion transactions. This year, we want to set our sights on supporting 10 x that volume at more than 100 billion transactions. We see an opportunity to drive transaction volume and revenue. Some of our biggest customers are already talking about as many as a billion transactions a month. Adding these customers together makes this goal a big opportunity. Clearly, this is only possible because of the public cloud, but we don't get it for free.
We're extending our architecture to leverage it and building a new data platform and transformation service for big data on GCP. This will provide scalability for account analysis and transaction matching as well as our other products. We're investing in full-text search, predictive analytics, and new microservices and containers for our mobile application. Of course, our new integration platform and connectors. Key takeaways: BlackLine is the dominant and most trusted accounting platform on the market for companies of all sizes, including some of the largest companies in the world. We're continuing to define and expand this market, and our opportunities are multiplying, and our pace of innovation is accelerating. Thank you for your time. Now that you've heard about our buyer, the problem we solve, and our product vision, we wanted to show you firsthand how BlackLine provides value to the controller.
We're going to take you on a tour of the BlackLine Accounting Cloud and demonstrate some of the common modern accounting use cases of the BlackLine platform.
The BlackLine Accounting Cloud makes controllers' lives easier. With BlackLine, data and processes are unified, repetitive work is automated, and accounting can focus on what matters most. From close task management to reconciliations and from journal entries to intercompany accounting, the work now gets done in one central location. Unlike the network drives and binders of the past, accounting teams can access and execute their work from anywhere. When a controller logs onto BlackLine, she sees a home screen that is purpose-built for her role. She has immediate visibility to the big picture. When needed, she can drill into the details. Dashboards highlight important information, areas of risk, and KPIs like overdue items, unusual fluctuations, and unrecorded adjustments.
A summary shows which items are ready for review and which items are complete. Any task can be easily tracked in BlackLine Task Management. Workflows can be assigned, dependencies can be highlighted, documents and comments can be stored. Accounting can access these items and collaborate from anywhere. Data from any source can be securely imported into the BlackLine Cloud. Certified connectors, APIs, and other import utilities ensure the data is complete. Whether there is one data source or 100, the information accounting needs is unified and standardized in BlackLine. Substantiating the accuracy of general ledger balances is key to financial statement integrity. With BlackLine, accounting teams can focus on high-risk accounts. With standardized BlackLine reconciliation templates, GL balances are automatically populated. Business rules are used to identify exceptions and required adjustments. Policies, procedures, and controls are embedded to ensure compliance and segregation of duties.
Up to 80% of accounts are auto-certified. Companies record hundreds, even thousands of journal entries every month. BlackLine can automate up to 80% of those entries. Journal entry templates are created in the cloud. Important information is automatically populated, and supporting documentation can be attached. Approvers review and certify, and BlackLine posts entries into the ERP. The ERP then returns a confirmation to the BlackLine Cloud, a closed-loop process. BlackLine uses intelligent business rules and logic to automatically match up to 99% of transactions, allowing accountants to focus only on the exceptions. BlackLine provides a unified hub that proactively manages intercompany processes from transaction initiation to netting and settlement. Intercompany relationships and rules are embedded in the platform. Issues are prevented or identified and corrected as they occur, and reporting is seamless. When pencils are down on the close, it's time for the audit.
BlackLine enables transparency and collaboration between companies and their auditors. Instead of daily meetings, emails, and flash drives to share information, BlackLine has auditor-specific roles. This unique access reduces client preparation time by up to 97% and enables a self-service approach for auditors. When accountants complete items in BlackLine, auditors can view evidence like sign-offs and supporting documents from anywhere, and they can test areas independently. With these integrated capabilities, BlackLine brings the traditionally siloed aspects of the close under one platform, and BlackLine continues to expand how we help the controller. With the acquisition of Remilia, BlackLine has added capabilities around accounts receivable and cash application.
BlackLine Cash Application uses the power of AI to automatically apply cash, reducing unapplied cash by up to 99% and reducing days sales outstanding, the number of days it takes for a company to convert its accounts receivables into cash, by 5-10 days.
As the Controller, I need visibility into our entire accounting universe. I need accurate, real-time data for better decision-making. I need my team of talented accounting professionals spending their time on exceptions, high-risk areas, and business partnering, not manually ticking and tying and spending their time on painfully routine work. I need them to manage by exception, not spending their time finding them in the first place. With BlackLine, I have that. Before BlackLine, my schedule was flooded with meetings to track progress reports and status updates for my entire team.
I used to think that meeting could have been an email, but now I know that meeting should have been BlackLine. Today, we have so much more time to focus on what matters most.
We hope you are enjoying the investor day thus far. We're going to take a quick 10-minute break, and then we'll resume with our program.
Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships. It empowers your organization to have more customer engagement as well as understand that customer more. The tools are easy to use, quick to set up, and it scales with your organization. Some of the benefits of using a SaaS-based environment is, one, the reliability. Anybody can access the system at any time from anywhere. Two, the auditability of that information. Everything's tracked and maintained, so you never have to worry about who did what when. Three, the automation.
You no longer have to find those exceptions. You're just solving the exceptions. BlackLine helped us achieve our goal of an efficient and accurate close by, one, just organization, allowing everyone to see where we are at the close at any time. Two, iteration and making the recon that are completed better, but also making them consistent across the entire world. Thirdly, automation. Now that we have these all identified, where can we take advantage of technology to make things done faster? We chose BlackLine because it's so powerful. We're able to process hundreds of thousands of transactions in seconds. It gives the CFO and the controller the visibility to see the state of the close at any time. This is extremely useful around quarter or yearly end, where you can start to take advantage of completing their own reports or their own assessments.
That's what BlackLine's allowed us to do. What has typically been a pain point in other companies I've worked for, using BlackLine at Zendesk, it's a seamless process.
Domino's mission is to be the dominant pizza company in the world, and we recognize that technology plays a huge role in that and making sure that we give our customers that enhanced experience that comes with technology. We were using a competitor's tool for matching in the past, and as part of a review of our overall electronic payments, our team did a competitive RFP process and looked at all of our options. When we saw the capabilities that BlackLine had to offer, we found that it was the most robust, and that's why we chose to expand into transaction matching.
When we first turned on transaction matching and our sandbox was live, and I was first able to run the past rules that we'd set up against our data, about 70% of those transactions automatically reconciled, and I was able to see that kind of glimmer of hope for what could be where most of our transaction volume was matching. Today, we're at a 99.9% match rate. That means I get to go look at those really, really interesting transactions now that are in that subset that aren't reconciling perfectly. That's where the real insight comes and the opportunity to provide better support and advice for the rest of the organization. When people think about Domino's, they just think about pizza, but our company is actually an e-commerce company that happens to sell pizza.
Our brand is about innovating to find the best way to deliver a quality product to our customers. Likewise, our accounting organization innovates to find the best way to deliver quality results to our stakeholders. BlackLine was the best partner to not just deliver the numbers, but to deliver confidence.
Hello. My name is Mark Woodhams, and I'm the Chief Revenue Officer for BlackLine. As CRO, I oversee all of the revenue functions at BlackLine, as well as owning our channels and alliances organization. My background has been closely coupled with the world of the finance buyer for the last 18 years, and in that time, I worked at both Hyperion and Oracle before leaving to accelerate the growth of the NetSuite organization in EMEA.
Today, you've heard Mark Huffman describe the challenges that BlackLine is in business to solve, the opportunity in front of us with a $28 billion TAM, our confidence in our ability to execute in the current demand environment, as well as our confirmed leadership position in the market. That market is truly diverse. One of the beautiful things about BlackLine is that it reaches across geographies, verticals, and companies of all sizes. Since I joined BlackLine in 2018, I've seen numerous customers realize the value that our platform brings to their business. It's far more than just adding efficiency and controls to their financial close. It's about enabling the controller to align with the performance objectives of the CEO and other functional leaders.
Our strategy is to be the indispensable platform to the controller, giving them back some of the time they spend on manual activities, time to spend on value-add activities, time to perform analytical and indeed more strategic activities. Marc stressed the importance of having an integrated and aligned go-to-market team, and I'm now going to spend the next 15 minutes talking about what that looks like in reality and the 2021 themes that support it. We segment our addressable market into enterprise and mid-market. That's organizations with revenue above $750 million for enterprise and below for mid-market, as well as having a completely, totally separate account management organization, which focuses on customer expansion. We have a global reseller relationship with SAP, which allows SAP to sell BlackLine products under an SAP Solex agreement. SAP provides an enhanced global sales reach as part of their sales distribution network.
In addition to that, we have a robust partner ecosystem, which includes global consulting alliances, regional consulting alliances, business process outsourcing partners, solution providers, and software and cloud partners. As part of any effective go-to-market strategy, it is vital that we are and we remain 100% aligned with our global customer team to establish and drive value throughout the complete customer lifecycle. In 2021, we have made some minor adjustments to our strategy, but in reality, these changes are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. First, we know that we need to continue to look after our customers. We need to continue to increase the level of intimacy that we have with them and make sure that they are maximizing the value from their investment in the solution.
Next, we intend to continue to grow our market share and know that in order to do that, we need to continue to secure new customers through every channel and geography that is open to us. Finally, the addition of accounts receivable automation to our portfolio brings us even more opportunity to ease the life of the controller. Taking BlackLine Cash Application to our customer base and indeed our prospects provides us with even more opportunity to accelerate. Kevin Kimber will take you through the go-to-market strategy for accounts receivable automation a little bit later today. Now, let's talk about each of these in a little bit more detail. Our first pillar. We know that our customer base is fundamental to our success, and the evolution of our account management organization team is part of a multi-year investment strategy.
In a hard economic environment, our customers continue to see the value in BlackLine and demonstrated that through further investment. This year, we are now expanding our account management organization to become a truly global one and as such, now have specific teams focused on our clients in every part of the world. Through our playbook, we have developed a standardized sales and customer intimacy process and are applying this to every customer. This allows us to maximize the opportunities throughout the customer lifecycle and ensures that we are giving every customer the right level of service. The ultimate goal here is to make sure that we penetrate throughout our customers' organizations and all of their affiliates to drive more product, more value, and more stickiness.
The success of our customer is critical in this area, and as Marc mentioned, we have expanded our investment in the strategic innovation team led by Tammy Kohli. This team works with our Fortune 500 customers to define success by creating a joint roadmap to guide them through their financial transformation journey. The very real value of the strategic innovation team is their collective experience as controllers and accountants at prior roles. They have personally been through all of the stresses and specific challenges that our customers are facing. Their real-world experience makes them a trusted advisor to our customers. They're there to help the customer to share their experiences and show the customer how to optimize their processes and realize value quickly. This encourages the customer to continue their finance transformation journey and, more importantly, leverage the real value from BlackLine.
An example of this can be seen by looking at one of our larger customers. This Fortune 100 apparel brand started their finance digital transformation journey with a smaller initial footprint. As they continued to realize value, they expanded their usage and in 2020, launched their global financial transformation. Like many of our customers, this customer started with close process management in 2017, purchasing the solution for their corporate accounting group. This purchase was utilized as a proving ground to fully evaluate the value that our platform can bring. They expanded their use of the solution, ramping up their transaction matching use to handle tens of millions of transactions on a monthly basis. Last year, through guidance of multiple alliance partners, they continued on their financial transformation journey through a global rollout and expansion of additional BlackLine product.
Even in uncertain economic times, they continued to streamline, and BlackLine became a strategic solution that is indispensable to their financial close. When we challenged them as to whether or not they were going to delay their BlackLine deployment, they said to us, "We cannot afford to wait. BlackLine is a number one priority for us." Our land and expand model, which is driven by customer success, can be seen across the board. In 2018, we began a concentrated effort to have more customers view BlackLine as a strategic vendor. We set ourselves a target of trying to increase the number of organizations spending more than $1 million annually on our solution. In order to facilitate this decision, we made some changes in our organizational structure to allow us to improve and align our resources to support our strategic customers more effectively.
The net result is meaningful acceleration towards this target over the past two years, growing from seven to almost 30 customers, each paying more than $1 million of ARR. As an aside, it's interesting to note that even in the tough external environment of 2020, we still managed to nearly double the number of these customers. The final point I'll make about these $1 million + ARR customers is that each of them has considerable room to grow their BlackLine footprint further with the addition of incremental users and products. This is a direct result of the prescriptive nature of our buyer and the fact that they take a phased approach to purchasing and deploying our software. Of course, we've recently expanded our product set with the addition of accounts receivable automation, and you just heard Pete address our product strategy and commitment to continued product innovation.
Our second pillar sits in the world of winning new customers. We demonstrated last year that we have the sales capability and execution to continue to win new business in a tough environment. One of our more strategic new logo acquisitions last year was with one of the world's largest organizations. They were dissatisfied with the value that they were deriving from the basic functionality provided by their existing ERP and EPM provider. Despite the IT organization being initially focused on trying to preserve the existing ERP-EPM relationship, we convinced this organization to take the best-of-breed approach, and they chose BlackLine to accelerate their finance digital transformation journey, citing our proven track record, our ability to deliver, and the technical superiority of the BlackLine platform. That is just one example of the many new business successes that we saw in 2020.
The $28 billion total addressable market that Marc referenced represents a large global opportunity. With nearly 80% of our revenue coming from domestic accounts, there is considerable room to grow domestically and internationally. As you can see from the map, EMEA and Asia-Pacific represent more than half of the global TAM. Our international presence is predominantly in EMEA, where we have strong market awareness and our largest international presence. We have a growing presence in APAC, including our joint venture with Japan Cloud to help grow our presence in Japan. Germany and Japan are two geographies that we are focused on in the near term. We've seen some early wins in both markets, but our presence there is nascent today, particularly when you look at the size of those markets. Japan alone represents 6% of the total addressable market, with Germany coming in at 3%.
We believe we can leverage our direct and indirect channel to capitalize on this significant international opportunity, and already this year, we're starting to see some momentum from well-known international conglomerates. As we look forward into 2021, our strategy remains to focus on sales execution and value-based sales excellence to drive our new business engine. We know we need to help our prospects understand the return on investment that they can take advantage of by deploying the best platform in the market, and to that extent, have been actively working with a simple and digestible framework that allows a prospect to start their digital finance transformation journey and see immediate value. This framework is prescriptive and allows for the customer to understand the journey and corresponding return on investment.
From our perspective, this approach reinforces our successful land and expand model, but also helps the customer approach transformation in consumable pieces. This thought leadership allows us to continue to bring value to the market. When we engage with a customer or prospect around their corporate goals, the conversation changes to a strategic discussion of proven use cases, processes that scale, and real value creation. Our modern accounting playbook, or MAP, offering is one example of how BlackLine uses its expertise and leadership to sell value and has been a strong growth lever for us in the mid-market. Customers go live faster, sales cycles are shorter. We've seen a significant win rate against no decision, as well as an improvement in head-to-head win rates. Customers understand how to engage and travel along the finance transformation journey more effectively.
We continue to focus on the value that we bring to our customers through our modern accounting playbook approach, and this approach has been incredibly successful from the perspective of adding new customers to the BlackLine family, as well as helping the customer to really map out their journey. The customer journey framework provides the guidance that they need to map out their financial transformation. It has allowed us to align to a customer's processes and demonstrate the value that we can bring from a position of strength. We've recently expanded this framework with the introduction of our collaborative accounting experience at our Beyond the Black event in November to guide customers and prospects along every step of their modern accounting journey.
We have turned the insights and learnings from nearly 300,000 accountants across more than 3,400 customers into leading practices that accelerate time to value and create great customer experiences. We are using this framework to challenge the customer's buying process. We are being more prescriptive as the experts to tell our customers, "Here is where you are going to start. Here is what's next on your finance journey," and laying out the future roadmap for their success. This is not only helping our customer align with their business objectives, but it's also enabling our reps to take an early approach to our land and expand model. The final pillar of our focus is around accounts receivable automation. We've had some good early traction in this space with some strong demand around cash optimization, and Kevin's going to provide more detail on this initiative later today.
In order to make all of these new business investments as effective as possible, we need a very strong and highly effective and aligned channel and alliance team. Partners hold the key for us. We have to embrace them openly and transparently because their success breeds our success. Since he arrived seven months ago, Mel Zellerdon has spent a considerable amount of time understanding our needs, the needs of our partner community, and taking our existing partner organization and adjusting it slightly to drive far more alignment into our organization. Mel will review these plans in more detail shortly. Now, let's move on to the competitive landscape. It's fair to say that I expect us to win every deal, but it's also fair to say that that's not always realistic. When we lose, the vast majority of the time it's to a no decision, no competition.
In those instances, we've not done a good enough job of enabling the customer to see our value. Our buyer is key to this equation, and we believe our MAP offering and our customer journey framework, which changes that conversation to become a strategic discussion around real value creation, will lessen the volume of no decisions. Less frequently, we may lose due to price. As the most comprehensive solution, we are also the premium price player. In some instances, prospects choose to go with a cheaper or free provider. At the lower end of the mid-market, we sometimes run into the situation where a controller wants to stay in Excel. In those instances, they may move forward with a less sophisticated point solution as a bridge, but we typically see those customers eventually once they outgrow that point solution.
The reasons we win are due to some very key differentiators. Our continued focus on customer centricity contributes to our success because it's apparent that our customers trust and believe in us. Our end-to-end accounting automation technology is purpose-built for our accountants, built on a single source of code, and brings a unified customer experience. We have a really strong partner ecosystem reinforcing our leadership position. Our customers are happy, and many only too happy to be referenceable, which is critical when prospects are looking to make the right decision. The automation we embed into our products provides a quantifiable return on investment. The solution is configurable to meet our different customers' needs to scale their operations. Across any ERP landscape, this delivers even more value for those clients with multiple ERPs.
We have a deep accounting domain knowledge, and we further expanded our expertise with the addition of BlackLine account receivables this year. You heard Marc Huffman address how we've seen other technology companies become attracted to the size of our market only to learn that they don't actually know how to address the needs of the controller or accountants. That's because what we do is hard, and it requires a strong knowledge of the accountant and their processes. We have competitive distance on our side between our tenure in this space and our knowledge of the accountant and the controller. Before I conclude, I'd like to address what we see in the market today. We continue to see improvement in the demand environment. Some of the deals that stalled in March and throughout Q2 of last year are starting to come back. We're seeing that progress more and more.
We've got some larger transactions starting to grow, not only in our customer base, but also with new customers. Our customers are telling us that the momentum behind digital transformation is just too important to deprioritize. Our partners are seeing that as well. Partner pipelines are inundated with transformation projects, and we believe BlackLine will be a big part of those at some point in the future. There is a level of optimism within our sales engine. With that said, we're not in control of the timing of the demand curve, but we are in control of our sales execution, our customer relationships, and our sales capacity. The experience of this go-to-market team, our market-leading position, our continued investment in product, our focus on customer value leaves me with a very high level of confidence in our ability to execute in an increasing demand environment.
With that, I'll now turn it over to Mel.
Thank you, Mark. Welcome, everyone. I'm excited to be here. My name is Mel Zellerdon, and as Mark mentioned, I am the SVP of Channels and Alliances. I'm responsible for overseeing all partner ecosystems globally. I joined BlackLine at the end of July of last year. My background has been entirely focused on enterprise software, from small companies to very large companies. Over the last 20 years, I've specialized in the partner ecosystem area and have led the strategy and execution of many different partner initiatives. Additionally, many of the companies I've worked for in the last 15 years had a focus on selling applications to the office of the CFO, from planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, to finance automation. I was brought on to BlackLine to scale strategic partnerships from both a go-to-market perspective and customer success and retention perspective.
My organization covers all the main partner types, including global strategic alliances. Our SAP Center of Excellence, which is a black belt technical sales team with deep expertise in both BlackLine and SAP, regional alliances, channel, software and cloud alliances, partner enablement and programs, and also partner success. Now that I've been with BlackLine for seven months, I thought I would share with you my early observations about the company and the future areas of opportunity. I inherited a great foundation with key strategic partnerships like SAP, Deloitte, and EY at a very good starting point with great executive sponsorship and commitment. As a matter of fact, partners are involved in anywhere from 60% to 90% of our larger sales every quarter, and we have room to improve in this metric.
My focus is to build upon this foundation and scale it multiple times over in both breadth and depth, and to build a partner team to support these initiatives with high leverage. There are two key topics I'd like to discuss with you today: our partner strategy and our partner ecosystem. Let's get started with our partner strategy. Our Channels and Alliances mission statement, which helps us build a world-class Channels and Alliances organization, is to accelerate and scale BlackLine's business by building, enabling, and leveraging a high-quality partner ecosystem that drives sustained growth and customer success. Moving forward, everything we do will be guided by this mission statement. Customer success and enabling BlackLine to scale will be at the center of everything that we do. At the cornerstone of our partner strategy is a comprehensive partner enablement program.
In this context, enablement means to provide our partners with a collection of BlackLine assets, along with training and certifications that our partners will need to be successful and represent BlackLine in the best light possible in the market. We are implementing mandatory minimum number of certifications across all prospect and customer touchpoints, including sales, demonstration delivery, product knowledge, MAP implementation methodologies, customer success, and technical support. We currently have nearly 500 actively certified product and implementation consultants. Among those consultants, more than half have the full platform certifications across all major products. We're also rolling out new certifications this year around sales, pre-sales, implementations, support, and customer success. Our plan is to exponentially grow these partner certifications through 2021. The high-level goal is to create an ecosystem of, one, partners that are self-sufficient through virtual enablement available worldwide on a 24-by-7 basis.
Number two, partners that deliver sustained high quality in sales engagements, customer projects, and consistently deliver our customer journey framework. Number three, partners that are encouraged to quickly grow and scale their BlackLine sales and services practices. With an understanding of our partner strategy, let's now dive into BlackLine's partner ecosystem. We are evolving the partner ecosystem to maximize the great relationships we currently have and to add partnerships in areas where we want expanded coverage. On the left is the sell-through channel motion that applies to resellers, solution providers, and business process outsourcing, or BPO partners. These types of partners are expected to source and sell BlackLine deals, and in some cases, like BPO, to also lead the customer implementations, customer success, renewals, and technical support.
On the right is the sell-with Alliances motion, where partners are expected to influence or co-sell deals and to lead the BlackLine project implementation. Number one, SAP and our solution extension or Solex relationship. We have a unique position as one of SAP's top Solex partners in the cloud. We will cover this partnership in detail today. Number two, global consulting alliances. EY and Deloitte have the most established BlackLine practices given their investment over the years, and we are also increasing coverage with KPMG and Capgemini and newer relationships with Accenture and IBM Global Services. Number three, regional consulting alliances. We will maintain momentum with these partners in North America and expand into other deals. Number four, BPO partners. We have a BPO program that allows us to play in this deployment model when customers decide to outsource accounting and accounts receivable automation functions. Number five, solution providers.
This program focuses on the North America mid-market and all segments of emerging markets. The objective is for these partners to be fully self-sufficient and also to source and sell their own deals to help us grow in these markets. Number six, software and cloud partnerships. Some of these will have a go-to-market component like referrals, co-sell, resell, but others will be behind the scenes adding value to our product capabilities. I'd like to take a few minutes to discuss our partnership with SAP in more detail. SAP has recently announced their new strategy to accelerate the migration of their customers to S/4HANA and to the cloud through the RISE with SAP offering. To summarize, there are three key reasons why we believe BlackLine is well-positioned to be front and center in SAP's new strategic intent. Number one, SAP is accelerating the move to the cloud.
BlackLine plays a big part in assisting SAP and its customers to get there faster and with lower risk. Number two, the RISE initiative is focused on leading practices and quick time to value. BlackLine is the leader in our space, and we have a long history of short implementation timeframes and quick ROI. As a result, SAP has BlackLine at the center of its recommended solution set for the record-to-report business process. Number three, we believe it is best practice to implement BlackLine before or concurrently with an S/4HANA migration. In fact, SAP has published blogs explaining that a best practice for their current customers is to implement BlackLine first to aid in the migration to S/4HANA. Let's take a look at the opportunity we have in our partnership with SAP.
As you can see on this map, SAP has more than 10,000 customers around the world with more than $1 billion in revenue, which is a sweet spot target for BlackLine. You may recognize that this number has grown since we last shared this stat in the September 2019 Investor Day. Through the Solex partnership, we get the benefit of an expanding SAP TAM as SAP grows our customer base. Over half of these customers are in markets where BlackLine has feet on the street, giving us coverage density. In the rest of the world, we have access to SAP's great distribution machine. We already have won several deals in these markets, and we expect more to come here in 2021. SAP has about 25,000 people in sales and marketing around the world. Out of these, about 15,000 are account executives and a similar amount of solution consultants.
Our mission is to turn as many of these professionals into BlackLine champions to open the door to their accounts and to endorse us. As you can see from the picture on the slide, our teams have done a very large amount of enablement to the SAP field already, with more than 3,800 SAP field professionals enabled on BlackLine through more than 229 enablement events worldwide. We are only scratching the surface, and we plan to accelerate and optimize our reach moving forward. Another area where we have made tremendous progress is in the marketing with SAP. SAP talks and writes about BlackLine on their own terms and blogs, as shown here. Despite a challenging 2020 due to the global pandemic, we continue to grow our Solex business, and we now have nearly 100 Solex customers. SAP is getting us in front of the largest customers in the world.
We currently serve 60% of the Fortune 50 and 46% of the Fortune 500. Solex helped strengthen that penetration with customer ads, including one of the Fortune 3, three of the Fortune 15, five of the Fortune 100, and twelve of the Fortune 1,000, among a growing number of large customers across multiple industries. In 2020, we nearly doubled the number of new Solex logos relative to 2019. Not only are we growing our Solex customers, but we're doing so at an accelerated pace. At nearly 10,000 SAP customers with $1 billion or more in revenue, there is a massive target audience of SAP customers for us to jointly go after. The focus here is both volume and quality of logo ads. As you heard from Mark Woodhams, our largest customers are spending more than $1 million in ARR with us, and that includes a 2019 Solex customer.
We believe the SAP customer base, which represents the largest companies in the world, can derive strong value from the transformational benefits of modern accounting. Over time, we believe SAP customers can represent some of the largest BlackLine customers. We're starting the third year of our Solex relationship, and we remain very excited about the long-term opportunity. SAP's growth should outpace every other ERP provider in the market. We always have said that the Solex relationship is a multi-year initiative, and we are pleased with how this partnership has continued to progress over the past 26 months. In 2021, we will focus on the following three initiatives. Number one, industry positioning. My BlackLine SAP Center of Excellence team has developed several industry points of view to be leveraged in our deal pursuits with SAP. SAP frequently goes to market by industry vertical.
Even though BlackLine solutions are generally industry agnostic, our team has packaged up materials and points of view that will make it easier for SAP to align BlackLine value with a specific vertical focus. We believe we can increase our close rates by jointly working with the SAP industry sellers to construct even more compelling customer proposals. Number two, leverage the recently announced RISE with SAP initiative to include BlackLine as the premier office of the CFO partner solution. Number three, optimize the engagement of the whole BlackLine sales organization through the completion of a Solex sales certification to maximize the effectiveness of the relationship. We are also growing what we call the Power Three initiative, which leverages the power of a global consulting alliance ecosystem like EY and Deloitte to maximize our chances of winning solution extension deals and ensure successful implementations and overall customer success.
The top three benefits of this approach are number one, joint account targeting; number two, joint messaging and deal execution; and number three, successful project delivery. To provide additional context around global consulting alliances, we are continuing to invest to drive success with these relationships in order to maintain our dominant position in the enterprise space and fend off our competitors. The focus of these partnerships is in the strategic and high-end of the enterprise space. Number one, we work with global consulting alliances to make them experts on our platform and products so that they can help us validate and influence key decision-makers in the largest accounts. Number two, global consulting alliances usually have access to key C-suite decision-makers in our target large customers and can help us open doors to sell our products.
Number three, these types of partners are extremely critical in complex deployments or large accounts. As more and more customers embrace our broader platform and the breadth of strategic BlackLine solutions that they can deploy, global consulting alliances have the power, the reach, and the skills to take on complex global deployments to ensure project and customer success. BlackLine has the lion's share of awareness and commitment from these partners compared to any of our direct competitors. They usually prefer, recommend, and influence decisions for BlackLine in our largest deals as they understand that the breadth and scale of the BlackLine solutions is the best fit for their large enterprise customers. Moreover, during a pandemic year, our top two partners grew their BlackLine consulting practice year-to-year by 60% and 250% respectively as measured by their active certified consultants.
The three most important metrics of success for these types of alliances moving forward are number one, explicit influence and recommendation for BlackLine in our top new logo pursuits. Number two, profitable growth in the BlackLine practices on a global basis. Number three, 100% customer success in all customer deployments. We are hearing from our global consulting alliance partners that despite the challenges that everyone experienced during 2020 due to the global crisis, companies have clearly understood that they need to accelerate investments in cloud-based solutions like BlackLine to better leverage the increased pace of digital change and to distance themselves from their competition.
Here we see another quote from one of our global strategic alliance partners, which reinforces our observation that post-pandemic companies recognize the value in implementing technology that allows F&I teams to seamlessly access systems remotely, reduce manual processes, and ultimately improve the visibility and accuracy of financial data. In summary, I hope that I was able to convey to you my excitement about the current state of the BlackLine partner ecosystem and the vision of how we will scale it to make it a significant growth lever for BlackLine in the coming quarters and years. I am going to turn it over to Kevin.
Thank you, Mel. Hello, everyone. I'm really pleased to be here and to have the opportunity to talk to you today. My name is Kevin Kimber, and I'm the managing director of Global Accounts Receivable.
I joined BlackLine in October of last year as part of the acquisition of Remilia, and as today is the first time you're hearing from me, I thought it would be useful to properly introduce myself. Prior to the acquisition, I was CEO of Remilia for two years, focused on scaling and growing the company from its initial founder-led bootstrapped roots to a global leader in the space. Over the last 20 years, I've spent my career building high-performing teams and companies across startup, growth, and global-scale tech organizations. Specifically, I was one of the founding team at ServiceNow, where I led the international expansion over seven years as we scaled from less than $1 million in ARR to $140 million and a $4 billion IPO in 2012.
After ServiceNow, I spent time at Zuora leading their international expansion, and I also spent three years at SAP leading their cloud business before moving into the venture capital world, both investing and advising early-stage SaaS businesses across Europe. Remilia was one of these businesses, and when I had the chance to step in full-time as CEO, I jumped at it because I knew that they had a great team and I could see the immense opportunity to disrupt and transform a critical area of finance. I'm very excited to now be part of BlackLine. I felt from the very first conversation with the leadership team that there was strong alignment in how we think about our employees, our customers, and importantly, the huge opportunity to disrupt both the accounts receivable space as well as finance overall.
At BlackLine, I'm responsible for the new global accounts receivable business, and I'm focused on ensuring we scale the business, scale the platform, and leverage the reach and reputation of BlackLine to achieve market leadership in the same way that BlackLine has with the financial close market. Now, moving beyond the introduction, let's start with an overview of the accounts receivable automation space and why this is such an important opportunity. Firstly, enormous teams of people today are still using spreadsheets, paper, and manual labor to manage their order-to-cash process. This slide may look familiar because Mark Huffman showed you a version of this for the financial close earlier today. You could literally overlay the two slides together given there are so many synergies between the two processes and the size of their complexity.
Similar to the financial close, accounts receivable has a lot of different people involved across various and inconsistent processes, and these processes are made harder by fragmented technology and disconnected data across multiple ERPs, banks, and other sources. You can see these processes are not optimized, and in many cases, weeks are lost as finance teams try to play a matching game with their payments and invoices, leading to delays in applying cash, friction in the customer relationship, reducing employee morale, and significant delays in the financial close process. Moreover, with a lack of understanding of what cash is outstanding and what still needs to be collected, businesses are unnecessarily writing off as bad debt that could be easily collected and applied if they deployed intelligent automation. Manual accounts receivable processes are not sustainable.
As you can see from this slide, they take too long, with manual payment processes consuming 50% of cash application effort. When we look at the combined value proposition of the now broader BlackLine suite, manual effort is the number one bottleneck in the financial close process. Automating accounts receivable not only delivers tremendous efficiency gains in isolation, but it also adds significant value to the financial close process. Managing risk is a business imperative, and according to PwC, over $1.5 trillion is held hostage on global balance sheets currently of globally listed companies. The report estimates that releasing this cash would be enough for global companies to boost their capital investment by 55% without the need to look externally for funding or putting their cash flow under unnecessary pressure. As we move across the slide, manual processes are expensive.
Now, this is an obvious statement, but to provide some context, in a recent APQC report that looked at the cost of the accounts receivable process, it was found that the cost per invoice is $0.71 and $11.50 for top performers versus bottom performers. In other words, it is 1,500% costlier for those performing in the bottom quartile. This inefficiency deeply affects morale and employee engagement as well as customer satisfaction, with 34% of productivity being lost with actively disengaged employees and customers frustrated as credit lines take too long to release, leading to poor customer experience and lost sales. As part of our now combined customer base, we have more than 30 joint customers who are already receiving significant benefit from the joint offering and will get even greater benefit as the two platforms are fully integrated, as you heard earlier from Pete.
If you think about the complexity that Mark outlined, the controller and their teams have to deal with, the ability to automate continuous accounting with accounts receivable processes fully integrated with the financial close automation is a game changer. At month-end, organizations receive on average 30% more of their payments in the last two or three days, and without an automated AR process, there is an almost impossible task for cash application teams to close the sales ledger with all of those payments fully allocated. Without intelligent automation, customers have to increase their staff to try and avoid simply putting payments on a holding account so that the sales ledger can be closed. Without intelligent automation, it leads to inaccurate reporting and creates a huge amount of rework at the start of the new month, as well as the potential for increased audit and compliance risks.
This inaccuracy then further impacts the finance team in terms of related reconciliations, with finance people working many additional hours on workarounds to ensure the month-end close actually can take place. With a fully automated AR and financial close process, payments are placed on account daily, enabling cash to be collected and applied in real time, and the financial close and audit process to be a seamless and efficient process. As one joint customer described recently following the transformation, month-end is now just another day, with a 160-hour reduction in manual effort purely around the final days of the month. With economic uncertainty, borrowing risk, and changing customer behaviors, cash management and business resilience has never been more important. Cash is the lifeblood of any business, so now, more than ever, the ability to rapidly apply payments to invoices and manage unpaid collections from customers is critical.
BlackLine accounts receivable automation delivers intelligent automation for accounts receivable, enabling fast, accurate, and automated cash application and collections. What do I mean by intelligent automation? In short, replacing manual tasks with a system that can replicate the activity a human would undertake, including learning logic-based decisions to determine the right outcome. BlackLine cash application, for example, can determine from the minimal data on a bank statement exactly which customer the account belongs to, which invoices the payments relate to, and manage things like deductions, tolerances, taxes, and fully apply the payments and journal back to our customer's ERP without being touched by a human for the majority of payments.
The BlackLine Cash Application removes all the manual effort and provides a streamlined, efficient, and automated process by bringing together all of the key data sources such as bank files, payments, invoices, remittances, lockbox images, and others to perform an intelligent match before then posting directly to the AR and sales ledger within a customer's ERP. If we now turn our attention to the size of the market and the opportunity it represents, similar to the financial close market, the accounts receivable market is largely a greenfield space with less than 3% of global businesses having achieved success in this area. This is a massive opportunity in the market, and whereas most organizations have already invested heavily in automating areas such as their accounts payable functions with platforms such as Coupa or Ariba, very few have invested in accounts receivable automation.
As you'll see from this slide, we believe the accounts receivable automation space is a $10 billion TAM, and that's growing, which, as I've said, is hugely underpenetrated. With AR as one of the largest assets on corporate balance sheets and with AR departments operating significantly in rears, leading to delays in their financial close, our any bank, any ERP, any language and currency platform, coupled with the core BlackLine suite of products, presents CFOs and controllers with a unique opportunity to deliver transformative automation. Cash management and business resilience is top of mind for CFOs, and we have seen a significant uptick in businesses coming to market looking for these solutions as the world has started opening up again, and it's both our challenge and our opportunity to be first to the table to ensure that we influence and drive that conversation.
Now let's address how we'll go to market. For 2021, there are three key pillars to our accounts receivable go-to-market strategy. The first pillar of the go-to-market is focused on the BlackLine customer base. AR automation is relevant to all industries, and when polled, our customers said this would be an area they'd like to see from BlackLine to connect the financial close with cash collection and application for one seamless process. Whilst we are applicable across the customer base, there are roughly 50% of existing customers that have been identified as either top or high priority for cash application, and we've seen positive early indications of interest from some of BlackLine's largest customers. We plan to leverage these existing relationships and agreements to drive customer value, evangelism, and advocacy, and accelerate market share.
In Q4, we closed our first few joint deals as extensions to existing contracts, which allowed for accelerated sales cycles. Our average sales cycle pre-acquisition was six months or less, and we expect that time could compress as we target the existing BlackLine customer base and leverage those existing relationships. Another focus for us is the SAP customer base. Roughly one-third of our AR customers are SAP, and we integrate directly into all SAP ERP versions to provide key data straight into their sales ledger, which SAP love, as do our customers. We've worked closely with SAP to achieve their certification for S/4HANA, and we see the continued market shift to migrate to S/4 as a catalyst. BlackLine, as an example, has nearly 900 SAP customers, and with many looking to migrate to S/4HANA, we view this portion of our customer base as an important growth driver for AR automation.
You might ask, is AR automation not an area that the ERPs cover? Much like BlackLine's financial close process, AR automation is an area where the trend is for organizations to look for best-of-breed technology to deliver innovation around their ERP. Our AR automation platform, as I've said, is bank, currency, language, and ERP agnostic and integrates with all commercially available platforms, which is really important to our customers given they typically operate globally with multiple banks, multiple currencies, processes, languages, and in many cases, have multiple instances of different ERPs. While the priority is to sell AR automation to the existing customer base, we believe there is also a large greenfield opportunity in new logos.
In Q4, we closed a small number of new logos due to the urgent need surrounding cash optimization, and we continue to see new logo opportunities developing since the start of the year. We believe we can use our cash application product as a key lever for new business pursuits. The market is responding really well to the acquisition, and momentum continues to accelerate. To give you an example of customer feedback, I was on an exec call with a customer this week where they shared that AR is a key area of focus for them in 2021, with close to $50 million of cash either uncollected or unapplied on their balance sheet, and the fact that they can now extend their BlackLine relationship to add AR automation to their financial close automation is really exciting to them.
Back to the pillars, the second pillar is ensuring appropriate support and infrastructure for AR automation growth. All AR sales executives will now serve as overlay team to the core BlackLine sales team to provide subject matter expertise and help drive the momentum and opportunities to maximize our collective success around the world. Many have been successful in overlay roles at previous organizations, which has enabled the teams to achieve a fast start together in terms of working in the field. At Remilia, we were a small company with a great product, but we lacked the resources and name recognition to drive large-scale sales execution. We are pleased with the customers that we've brought on and our industry-leading renewal rates in the high 90s and retention rates around 110%.
Our customer following is really strong, and the pandemic and the corresponding liquidity concerns have made our value proposition mission-critical in today's market. With BlackLine's brand, global direct sales team, and strong partner ecosystem, we now have the scale to drive further adoption of accounts receivable automation and deliver additional value to our customers. Through the course of Q4 2020, we brought on additional headcount across sales, pre-sales, customer delivery, and development, and plan to hire more resources throughout the year to capture the large and growing AR automation opportunity. The third and final pillar is to leverage the existing BlackLine and Remilia partnerships with firms such as EY, KPMG, Deloitte, SAP, and Capgemini to increase our reach and influence in the market.
We're already seeing a lot of interest and traction from these partners globally, and we're underway with our partner onboarding so that they are able to talk knowledgeably about AR automation to their customers and gain the necessary skills to deliver implementations. Having talked through the key elements of the go-to-market, let's now turn our attention to how this translates into growth. The average ARR for BlackLine Cash Application ranges from $50,000 a year on the low end to over $1 million a year on the high end, and ARR is calculated on the number of payments a customer wishes to automate through the platform. One of our larger customers, as an example, is a $700,000 a year subscription for Cash Application, but as an example of the land and expand potential, that only covers 50% of the customer's volume.
This should give you a sense of the size and both the problem our customers face, as well as our opportunity to drive growth within our business. In addition to capturing new revenue, we plan naturally to ensure a stable base of revenue within our existing AR customers. All Remilia customers have now been transitioned into the BlackLine account management organization, as well as into the BlackLine customer support offering, meaning they now benefit from increased 24x7 support, scale, and maturity. Now that you understand more about the opportunity, let's dive into a couple of case studies and a customer video. However, before we do that, I wanted to share some average stats that we see across our customer base.
As you'll see, these are really powerful stats, with customers achieving a 99% reduction in unapplied cash, an 85% reduction in manual effort, and importantly, 95% of cash applied on receipt, leading to a streamlined and efficient financial close at month-end. A 5-10 day reduction in DSO may not sound like a lot, but to put that in context, one of our customers previously took 93 days on average to collect their cash, and each day, importantly, was worth $150 million. With even just a 5-day reduction, that's unlocking $750 million of cash with control, certainty, and efficiency. Now let's hear from our customers.
The Remilia solution offered us clarity on our sales ledger because we effectively eliminated unallocated cash.
More than 50 countries, we have now one process, where before we had like 15-20 variations of the same process, let's say.
We're repatriating the debt receipts, essentially the repayments to our facilities, much more quickly than our competitors can. Once you have this data from your system, you have this pool of data, and at the moment we are sitting in this situation where we're saying we don't really know what to do with that. I think that is the point where financial relationship management would need to come in.
We've spent the last 18 months digitizing the whole of our onboarding process, and what primarily that's been about is gaining data insight and using that data to really inform us around some of our credit decisioning, reducing our bad debt, reducing the level of fraud.
My experience with Remilia has been very positive. Remilia brought in a lot of experience and made us aware of what we would need to think ahead of as well.
They know about automation of accounts receivable. They've done the job.
Remilia have been a very, very important partner. Certainly, the way that we've implemented or undertaken all our implementations has been extremely smooth, and it's been very much a partnership.
As you just heard, our customers experience a real, strong, and tangible set of business benefits. If we look at some customer examples a little deeper, you'll see further evidence of this. First up is a joint customer to demonstrate the strength of the ROI combined with real business outcomes. There's a really powerful set of stats here, but a couple of things worth highlighting. Their FTEs reduced from 16 - 2.5, enabling redistribution of resources.
They no longer needed extra FTEs at month-end to support the financial close process, and they were able to remove their reliance on Lockbox, removing significant keying fees, which often run into multimillions of dollars annually. Their unapplied cash, importantly, reduced by 99%, and they were able to support sustained business growth of over 30% without needing additional heads. Second up is another of our joint customers who are a great example of the expansion potential in large accounts. You'll see here the growth potential is huge, and this is just for cash application. The expansion potential, as you'll see, is over 70% as we scale across their additional divisions and take their current $390,000 ARR to beyond $1.1 million. Finally, is an example of a customer that has impacted their accounts closing process, highlighting the combined value of our joint capability. Some data points here worth highlighting.
Applied cash is now seven times faster and completed daily by 10:00 A.M. 82% of payments are automatically matched and applied without manual intervention, which leads to a reduction of 160 man-hours previously needed to support the month-end close. Simply put, doing this manually makes no sense. With BlackLine AR automation, there is a better way. Now more than ever, business resilience and cash management is top of the agenda, and we can help the market unlock over a trillion dollars held hostage on balance sheets. Cash application, as you've just heard, is just the beginning. Pete spoke earlier about the additional modules that we plan to introduce throughout the year that will deliver further game-changing capabilities to the market. The team is in the final phases of delivering AR Intelligence to the market.
This is a new analytical product, which is a natural complement to AR automation and provides CFOs and finance leaders with a detailed understanding of their customers' behaviors. As we help our customers ensure resilience, the ability to provide real actionable intelligence on how their customers are behaving is critical. AR Intelligence will provide a deep understanding of our customers' financial behavior, the financial risk and opportunity within their customer bases, as well as cash forecasting to drive improved decision-making and customer patterns, which then all links back to our financial close suite for inter-currency adjustments, intercompany cash, bad debt reserves, and suspense accounts. We're very excited to have joined forces with BlackLine, and as we continue on our shared journey to drive digital transformation for finance and accounting with intelligent automation.
Thanks so much for listening, and before I turn it over to our CFO, Mark Partin, you're going to hear from a couple of really happy BlackLine customers. Thanks very much.
Modern technology has allowed us to move from filing cabinets full of account reconciliations and backrooms to being able to approve them on your iPad at home. We're using BlackLine to assist us in this process to leverage additional controls and additional programs to validate the accuracy, which then also allows us to spend more time in analyzing and providing information to our business partners. At CNH Industrial, we produce tractors that can drive themselves. We produce vans that have zero carbon dioxide emissions, but we still have accountants fighting over spreadsheets. BlackLine has helped our accounting department transform from being an inconsistent, segmented business across our regions to being a uniform, globally competitive department.
Professionally, having BlackLine and the tool available to us has increased my ability to review a lot more areas in a lot less time and be a lot more comfortable with those areas. On the professional side, it saved my career from wanting to leave the accounting industry because it was just obnoxious during close to now enjoying my job. You go from really not enjoying what you're doing, but having to do it to get to what you enjoy, to just focusing on the really important stuff. That way you can actually catch errors, catch mistakes, or ask questions that matter. Personally, the change has been—it's hard to imagine that it's been bigger than the change in my professional life, but it probably has been. When people need to be gone, there's no fear anymore. There's no need to say no to a vacation.
Simply, we have more freedom. That would not be possible without BlackLine as a repository to hold all of that data and all of that information. It is accounting. It is for our professional lives, but do not discount the impact it will have on your own personal life and on the personal lives of those that work with you or for you.
Welcome back to the BlackLine Investor Day. My name is Mark Partin, and I am the CFO of BlackLine. I have been with BlackLine the longest out of everyone you have heard from today. I joined in 2015, and I am incredibly grateful to be a part of the BlackLine story from pre-IPO through today. I am very excited for the significant opportunity ahead of us.
Before we get started, you've heard a great deal about the controller today, and I wanted to share my perspective as CFO since I oversee accounting and the controller. The challenges that the controller faced, which have now been exacerbated due to the pandemic, are flowing upstream to the C-suite. There is more risk and uncertainty around the numbers. Data analysis is taking longer, and CFOs are not getting the information they need to come to the table with real-time data and analytics. This is a big problem for CFOs at companies of all sizes, industries, and geographies. I'm sure many of you have heard me say before that CFOs don't make their careers on accounting, but they can lose it on accounting if something goes wrong.
In the last decade, strong tailwinds, growth opportunities, a raging bull market have forced CFOs to pay less attention to accounting than ever before. They go where the CEO needs them to spend time, and that has been a growth-minded, strategic partner who rarely gets asked by the executive team or the board about their accounting processes. Most assume it is going smooth and it's working fine, but in times like a pandemic, the critical nature of accounting becomes top of mind. The pandemic has highlighted areas of risk in the back office and revealed the limitations of existing processes and systems. What may initially have been a cost-saving shortcut is now generating more manual work. It's impacting morale, and it's driving overall inefficiencies and risk.
Greater automation, improved workflows, the ability to collaborate across a distributed workforce, and better connectivity across disparate systems are the areas that are top of mind for today's CFO, and they are challenging their organizations to adapt. I'll point out that controllers and accountants have obviously been aware of these challenges and legacy systems, but their voice is now echoing at the highest levels of finance. This is exactly where BlackLine comes in. We help those organizations who are limited by manual processes and looking for approved efficiencies. This is something that I get really passionate about when I'm speaking with my peers because I know how daunting this can seem for CFOs and controllers who are tasked with solving these problems. The beauty is that BlackLine has already solved these problems for more than 3,400 customers.
I spend a lot of time connecting with my peers, and this is the first time that I am hearing so many CFOs discuss their challenges with the processes surrounding the financial close. This is a CFO-level issue. Accounting is no longer about just closing the books. It's moved up from risk into productivity and efficiency, and it's now a strategic priority for the CFO. The distributed work environment, remote audits, concerns over liquidity created by the pandemic is driving digital transformation spend to the back office, and this is a catalyst for our market, and it's a very positive long-term trend. Today, more than ever, CFOs, controllers, and accountants around the globe need our leadership and help.
I wanted to give you that CFO perspective so you can see why we are in the early stages of a huge market opportunity and why we believe demand trends will continue to favor our value proposition for a long time. I urge all of you to reach out to the CFOs that you frequently engage with and ask them directly about this matter. Now let's dive into the key areas that make our business so compelling, and you've heard this addressed throughout the day, but I think it bears repeating. Our market is now a massive $28 billion with the addition of accounts receivable automation. Both the financial close and AR automation markets are underpenetrated, and in the very early innings, we are the leader in the space, and there's plenty of TAM for us to go after.
We have a proven land-and-expand model, which I will speak to in more detail shortly. We have a durable operating model of high-margin subscription revenue, which generates high visibility into recurring revenue growth. We have sustained investment throughout the pandemic and will continue to invest in our business to drive long-term profitable and sustainable growth. Over the long term, we believe we are well-positioned for continued profitability and accelerated cash generation. Let's start with our customers and users. We continue to land new customers, and you can see this in our customer and user numbers over time. Our customers are broad, diverse. They span industries and geographies and market segments. We serve some of the largest companies in the world with an enterprise customer base that spans more than 1,800 customers. We've averaged 200+ new enterprise logos a year for the past six years.
The focus up market is not just logo ads, but quality logo ads. With our largest customers spending 7+ figures with BlackLine, we are looking to partner with like-minded companies who believe in and have budget to support digital transformation in their back office. Down market, our mid-market customers have been driving a larger volume of wins, ranging from 200 to nearly 400 new mid-market logos a year. Today, we have more than 1,600 mid-market companies, and that number is growing at an accelerated pace due to our modern accounting playbook offering. The MAP offering and Solex were two areas that enabled new logo growth in the midst of the pandemic. These are areas that we are continuing to invest in and areas that we believe will continue to drive customer and user ads in the current environment.
As the market recovers, we expect to capture an accelerated volume of new logos, and there are plenty of new logos for us to go after. Just to put that into perspective, there are an estimated 165,000 target companies around the globe with $50 million or more in revenue. That assumes around 17,000 enterprise customers and nearly 150,000 mid-market customers. Our combined 3,400 customers represents a mere 2% of the total market. Earlier today, the team addressed how one of our primary initiatives to land new logos is from the Solex partnership, and I wanted to provide some color on that partnership. As you heard from Mel, the Solex partnership is getting us in front of the largest customers around the world. Not only that, but we're able to benefit from SAP's pricing power, which is driving premium-priced deals throughout the year.
Our Solex wins have consistently ranked in our top five largest new deals each quarter. As of Q4 2020, they're also starting to rank in our largest account expansion deals. There is a huge opportunity for us to leverage this partnership to drive strategic large wins all around the globe. Let's take a look at how the early years of the Solex partnership have impacted our business. On the left, you can see our revenue from SAP partnerships, which includes revenue from both Solex and the predecessor EBS partnership. You can see that metric plateau, which corresponds to the initial launch of the Solex relationship in November 2018, followed by an expected headwind as the Solex ramped. That headwind is reflected in sales coming in below trend in 2019, the first full year of the Solex partnership.
We saw sales accelerate in 2020 as the Solex partnership matured, albeit still below the 2018 levels, and it was further impacted by the demand environment. Solex sales have continued to ramp over the past two years, growing year over year and coming in within our range of expectations. We've seen two really strong sales quarters from Solex, both Q4 of 2019 and Q4 of 2020. In 2021, we expect to see continued acceleration of our Solex sales, particularly in the demand environment that's improving. Over the long term, we believe this partnership remains one of our large global growth opportunities. After we land the customer, we have a proven expand model with a high net retention rate based on a growing portfolio of platform solutions. We are focused on getting our customers, keeping them, and growing them in the BlackLine footprint.
Our expansion model is something we've discussed quite a bit today and a huge growth lever for the business. We've invested a lot of resources and money in retaining our customers, ensuring that they have a great experience. As a result, we've been able to maintain industry-leading renewal and retention rates. As you can see, these metrics were impacted in 2020 as a result of the pandemic. Renewal rates for the enterprise remained consistent at 98%, but we did see elevated churn at the low end of the mid-market. From an expansion perspective, the macro environment impacted demand at the high end of the market, which drags on our dollar-based net retention rate, but we expect that to recover. Let's discuss how we're going to do that. As you can see from the slide, our customers are growing their BlackLine footprint.
Most of our customers start with two or three products, which includes account recs, tasks, and maybe an additional product, likely transaction matching or even possibly journal entries. This is the foundation that Mark Huffman outlined earlier today. As our customers expand, they purchase more of our platform, and our customer base now averages four products out of a total of nine. Customer expansion is also driving growth in our average ARR per customer, particularly up market where there is considerably more opportunity. Since IPO, we have seen our average enterprise customer grow from around $100,000 to $160,000 in ARR. In the mid-market, our average customer has grown from around $30,000 to nearly $45,000 in ARR. Among our core products, there is also room for adoption of incremental products and additional users. Adoption of our strategic products is very nascent, with significant headroom for growth.
We believe transaction matching is applicable to our entire customer base. Smart Close is a good fit for SAP customers today, and ICH is applicable to all enterprise customers. You can see the adoption has increased relative to the last time we showed this data at our 2019 investor day. Recall that with the addition of Remilia, we also have added a new product into our strategic product portfolio. Cash application is applicable to all customers, and we currently have about 4% attached. Our strategic products are priced at a premium relative to our core products, and the price per product increases as you go to the right on this slide. We have a significant opportunity to capture customer expansion through the addition of our strategic products. As you can see on this slide, we have outlined the incremental opportunity within our installed base.
ICH is the largest opportunity due to its premium pricing and large potential for attach with our enterprise customer base. Cash application is the second largest, given it's a new product for our customers and one that is applicable to our entire customer base. We expect to see continued strong adoption of transaction matching, and Smart Close is the smallest opportunity today and it's aligned with a smaller number of customers who are candidates for the product. All in, we estimate that strategic products represent an incremental $800 million in ARR among our existing customer base, which is why Mark Woodhams is prioritizing investment in our account management organization and customer success teams. BlackLine is high growth, high margin cloud subscription business that sells mission-critical software that's sticky, and it's more valuable than ever.
We have a large base of quality customers with high renewal and retention rates, which has helped us weather this pandemic and come out on the other end even stronger. Our financial model is supported by a predictable subscription revenue stream that comprises 93% of total revenue, and it drives total subscription gross margin of 87%. Our high gross margin allows us to fund strategic initiatives that drive future scale and future growth. While we've continued to invest to drive top-line growth, at the same time, we've been able to generate profit margin expansion by driving efficiencies in our go-to-market engine and by gaining leverage in our back office operations. You can see this operating leverage in this slide. Sales and marketing has come down from nearly 60% in 2016 to 42% in 2020.
Research and development came down to 12% in 2018, but we're building that back up to invest in our future. We continue to expand our customer reach to increase market share and provide opportunities for upsell and drive share of wallet. Our customers have a high lifetime value, and we're expanding and deepening our relationships with them, resulting in even better unit economics. As we continue to leverage our partner ecosystem, we anticipate continued operating leverage from our model. Our free cash flow margin has tracked with our growth and profitability as our financial model reflects limited CapEx investment and a favorable billings-to-cash cycle. Our financial model has always been a source of great pride, and that model was tested and validated yet again throughout the pandemic.
We're able to put our balance sheet to work to not only invest in our business and make our largest acquisition to date, but also to help our customers in need. We did so in the form of customer relief, ranging from extended billing and payment terms to one-time credits, and in some instances, reduced billing for customers that were in impacted industries. We were so pleased to put this money to work, and it has generated a lot of goodwill with these customers, which we believe will serve us over the long term. Throughout this day, you've heard us address how we will continue to invest to fuel long-term growth. Let's see how those investments will impact our financial model. Despite increasing investments in 2020, we benefited from cost savings due to work-from-home regulations and virtual marketing events.
As you've heard from the team throughout the day, we're committed to investing in BlackLine's future, and we intend to make targeted investments in the areas of the business that you've heard our leaders address today. The two largest areas of investment are our technology platform and our product innovation. Pete spoke to the modernization of our platform as we migrate to the public cloud. Our migration will require incremental upfront costs, particularly as we navigate a dual cloud environment during the transition. That will drive gross margins down a couple of points in the near term. Longer term, this investment will enable growth as we become more nimble scaling our platform as our customer base grows. Pete also addressed our continued innovation in product, and you can see that in our R&D expense, which we expect to increase from 14% up to 17% of revenue.
Included in that effort is a significant focus on the Remilia integration and ensuring that we capitalize on the large and growing AR automation space. We expect and will continue to invest in our sales and marketing efforts in 2021. In addition to these organic investments, we'll evaluate future M&A as a vehicle for accelerating growth. We have two acquisitions under our belts, and we'll continue to look for adjacencies that best serve the controller. What do these investments mean for near-term growth? Looking to the top line, we are guiding to full year 2021 revenue of 17%-18% growth. Candidly, this is not the growth rate we were targeting pre-COVID, and it's not how we define our growth company. The deceleration in growth is an outcome of the pandemic throughout 2020, as revenue is a trailing metric for our business.
For these reasons, we do not believe revenue growth will be the best indicator of our performance for 2021. Instead, we recommend you look at trailing 12-month billings to better assess the benefits of an improving demand environment throughout 2021. You can see the impact of COVID on our billings in 2020 when it hit a trough in Q2 and has since rebounded, driven by an improving demand environment. You can see that benefit in our results with two quarters of accelerated growth in billings and accelerating growth in deferred revenue and subscription revenue in Q4. Given the steady improvement that we have seen in 2020, we anticipate the demand environment will continue to improve throughout 2021 and drive positive acceleration in sales. Everything that we have discussed today is to showcase our multi-year campaign to re-accelerate long-term revenue growth.
Before COVID, we were able to successfully accelerate our calculated billings growth from 25% up to 28% in 2019. We believe an improving sales environment in 2021 will flow through and re-accelerate revenue starting again in 2022. Finally, moving to our long-term target operating model, we continue to target 20% plus operating margin. Over the long term, we are well positioned for continued profitability and accelerated cash generation. Before we break for Q&A, I wanted to summarize the highlights from today's session. Mark Huffman educated you about the controller and the critical role that they play in an organization's financial health and how their responsibilities have been further complicated by the pandemic. BlackLine knows this buyer better than anyone. We understand their needs, and we know how to solve their problems.
Pete clearly laid out our product vision and how we have a unique opportunity given where we sit in this ERP landscape to build on our dominance in the financial close market. We have already expanded to adjacent markets with AR automation and cash, and that is just the beginning. We are expanding on a multi-product platform that enables share of wallet growth and increases stickiness. We want to be the system of activity for the controller. You've heard from our GTM team. Timing is everything. Even though we've been around for 20 years, now is the first real investment cycle in our space. The pandemic has served as a significant catalyst for digital transformation in the back office. This is long overdue, and BlackLine is well positioned to capitalize on this wave of spend that we believe will accelerate as the macro environment recovers.
We are truly in the early innings of a $28 billion TAM, and we believe we're the clear leader in this space. I just laid out for you how we are continuing to invest for growth and capture this large market opportunity and how our durable operating model and strong unit economics will enable us to realize future operating leverage north of a 20% margin. We think there is a huge path ahead for BlackLine. Demand is building. We continue to execute in the current macro environment, and we are ready and very excited for continued improvement in the demand environment. Thank you for all of your time. We're going to take a short five-minute break, and then we'll resume for a live Q&A session with the presenters that you heard from today.
Okay, let's try that again. Sorry, everyone.
We're going to move on to the Q&A portion of the event. Thank you all for submitting your questions throughout the day. As a reminder, if you do have a question, feel free to ask it using the Q&A widget at the bottom of your screen. Let's begin with the first question. It comes from Matt Stotler with William Blair, and the question is for Mel. Mel, good to see the progress with SAP with nearly 100 Solex customers. Are most of these wins coming in North America, or are you seeing success broadly from a geographic perspective?
Thank you, Mark. As of Q4 of 2020, we have Solex customers headquartered in all major SAP and BlackLine regions around the world.
While North America has the largest share of these customers where they're headquartered, we are seeing traction in all geos, including ones where we don't have BlackLine office presence, for example, in Latin America. While different regions are in different maturity stages, the trends in all of them are very positive as we have fine-tuned the way my team and our sales teams work with SAP in each region. Finally, we have learned that while our product and messaging is universal, the way we engage with SAP and its customers requires a bit of fine-tuning on a regional basis to be able to maximize effectiveness and deal closure. We will continue to fine-tune that process.
Thank you, Mel. The next question is for Mark Woodhams, and the question comes from Rob Oliver with William Blair, or sorry, with Robert Baird.
Mark Woodhams, you mentioned your win with one of the largest global enterprises last year. Can you talk about that win? In particular, it would be interesting to hear if the win mirrored your typical enterprise land starting with Account Analysis and how penetrated you feel you are now at that client.
Okay, thanks, Rob. This company delayed their entry into finance digital transformation, but actually saw the pandemic as a catalyst and an opportunity to accelerate. As I mentioned earlier, they realized quite quickly that their current ERP and EPM vendor would not give them the capability they needed, and so decided to partner with us.
It's fair to say that they landed larger than some with a bigger initial investment, but it still followed the land and expand model because there's still plenty of room to grow into that customer for us and indeed more value for them to see themselves. I guess the final observation for me, I think it reflects the level of prioritization that I'm starting to see more and more now in the marketplace.
Thank you, Mark. The next question I'm going to combine two coming from Matt Stotler, William Blair, and Rob Oliver. This question is going to be both for Pete and Mark Huffman. I think we're going to start with Pete. Great to see the focus on enhancing BlackLine's underlying architecture to support more scalable platform. One, how do you think about that timeline to roll out everything on Google Cloud?
Two, how much choice, if any, do customers have in that timing? Will all BlackLine customers be on GCP by the end of 2020? As BlackLine becomes more acquisitive, can you talk about how the tech platform is suited for integration?
The migration, we have basically a two-year timeframe for migrating our customers. This is a big year. Next year will be another big year. Our goal is to migrate half of our customers this year and half next year. Our intention is that this is a platform for all of our customers because as we're building out all of our new services, all of the new dramatic scalability, the data platform, all these new capabilities, we're taking advantage of the public cloud. We're taking advantage of the services that Google Cloud has. Our intent is that we migrate all of our customers to the cloud.
Having said that, we're working very closely with our customers with the timeline that makes sense for them. We're being sensitive to their needs and making sure that they're ready and up for the migration, the timing works for them. We're taking an opportunity to continue to modernize and invest in our platform along the way with microservices. Everything that we're building new is cloud-native and is intended to take advantage of that dramatic scalability and the new features that are available in the cloud. Very excited about the progress we've made and about the transition going forward.
Thank you, Pete. Our next question is for Mark Huffman, and it comes from Matt Kos with JPMorgan. Mark, BlackLine solutions are for controllers, but do controllers also sign off on the decision to purchase BlackLine, or are CFOs the one ultimately signing off on the purchase?
That's a great question. Thank you. I think increasingly controllers are in the position where they need to modernize what they're doing in order to create capacity to support the strategy, the executive team, and the CFO. I think the right way to think about it in our environments that we sell into and the customers that we support and serve is sort of threefold. At the top, when people are signing off on strategic vision for the organization, specifically transformation around accounting processes, that's a CFO-level initiative. I had the opportunity to chat last week with one of our BlackLine customers. It's a European multinational, multi-billion-dollar toy manufacturer. They talk about their three-year strategy to future-proof their accounting organization. That's clearly CFO material. The controller's role in that is to decide how they create that capacity and what they modernize in the processes that they support.
They go about selecting the tools available to them and the process modifications. They are supported by these global process owners. Someone who may own the record-to-report process is just one example of somebody who would be actually working with our teams in the selection process. I think you have three real layers there depending on the size and the nature of the strategy and the complexity of what an organization is going to bite off on.
Thank you, Marc. Let's move on to another question from Rob Oliver at Baird. This one is going to be for both Pete and Marc, or sorry, we will start with Marc Huffman, and then Pete, I think you should add some additional context. There is considerable excitement around RPA software vendors who promise to digitize manual processes throughout the enterprise. Some have talked about the financial suite and accounting.
BlackLine has always been about reducing manual processes. Can you talk about how you view RPA? Do you see them as competition today? Is BlackLine the de facto RPA vendor of choice for the controller? How much does domain expertise play a role in decision-making here? Marc Huffman, we'll start with you, and then we'll go to Pete.
Yeah, sure. Great question. We'll start with you. We have a number of partnerships with RPA vendors. We view it as complementary to what we do in many cases.
It's important context, I think, to understand that RPA itself exists because of the complexity and the environments of our customers and the manual nature of the work and the repetitive nature of the work that has been sort of designed and created over the past hundred years, if you will, and then how ERP software providers sort of built their software to solve for some of those things that no longer represents the current practices. We view our plans as something that can solve it and evolve almost next-generation RPA by making it more purpose-built, more designed to solve specific and known accounting challenges that better fits into an accounting organization's IT landscape. Pete.
It's kind of the glue between the systems, right? It's a great way to automate the integrations you have between your systems.
The more robust your platform is with embedded automation and intelligence, the fewer the seams are going to be that you have to worry about. That is really the motivation for our investment in finance automation, to be able to provide that embedded orchestration, the embedded automation and intelligence that can drive that overall process. We see it as continuing to be synergistic with our existing partners that do provide RPA, but there is a greater level for that level of intelligence and greater opportunity when you can embed it deeply into the platform. That is a big focus for the investments, as we talked about earlier.
Thank you, Pete. Let's ask another question for Mel. Mel, this one comes from Baird. Mel, on SAP, you mentioned that focus on Salesforce enablement at SAP.
I think you said around 3,800 enablement touchpoints and that that would accelerate. Where do you think that number will be in the next year or two, and what gives you confidence in the SAP channel? Any changes to incentive structure for 2020 in 2021?
Thank you, Rob. There are three questions there. Just to answer the first question, I would not like to offer a specific number as we want to focus on effectiveness. Also, we need to take into account some changes in the SAP sales organization year to year. Also, we are going to be refreshing our content for the SAP reps that have worked with us. Also, we are going to continue to have enablement touchpoints with all the sales organization as the partnership matures. We are going to be refreshing the enablement with our industry point of view and assets, right?
That's additional enablement we need to do. We also align with the SAP account executives that can close the deals and target logos. We're working already with BlackBelt SAP solution consultants to certify them in three different levels of BlackLine capabilities and institute our train-the-trainer approach to reach more SAP sellers and technical experts. On the second question, we continue to be very confident on the SAP channel as the BlackLine message is really resonating with the sales organization, their finance solutions organization, and of course, our joint customers. To your third question, as you probably know, SAP is doubling down on the migration to the cloud, and that is also reflected in their compensation plans for the account executives. For this year, for 2021, the SAP account executives, the majority of the compensation has shifted to cloud-based products.
The good news is that Solex is a premier solution on the cloud, and therefore we're really well positioned to capitalize on this focus.
Let's direct a question to Kevin Kimber. Kevin, this question comes from Josh Beck at KBCM. You mentioned less than 3% of global businesses automate AR. What do you see as the key catalyst to drive greater AR automation, and how has the pandemic impacted awareness and demand for this opportunity?
Thanks, Josh. That's a great question. If you look at the accounts receivable space, there's a number of different areas where organizations have looked to automate from a finance perspective. If you look at the significant TAM and the lack of penetration in that space, the catalyst for growth is going to be right now. Business resilience, cash management has never been higher up the agenda.
In addition to that, you've got compression on the treasury side as organizations find it harder to cover working capital exposure through additional borrowing. You would have heard me say earlier that at any one time, there's over $1.5 trillion of cash held hostage on corporate balance sheets. The ability to unlock that cash to provide their own resilience, to provide their own certainty, and optimize their customer relationships is a really critical focus area for these businesses. The catalyst, as we see in the business, just in terms of the macro headwinds in the industry at large, are varied and significant.
I'm going to direct the next question at Mark Partin, and he did have some audio issues, so please bear with us in case there's a bit of a challenge here. Mark Partin, this question comes from Andrew at Barenberg.
Mark, for how long will the dual cloud environment last, and will we expect that to pressure gross margins?
Yeah, thanks. I appreciate the question. We spoke about this being a multi-year journey. We are expecting that we'll run a cloud transition model for a couple of years as we move our customers, and they migrate in earnest this year and next year. Over time, I think Pete has said we will focus on the Google public cloud, but we'll maintain, as most companies do these days, a multi-cloud environment. The pressure we're expecting from the transition should occur this year and next year. As we come out of that, our target model and gross margin should get back to where we spoke at 83% on the total.
[inaudible] Huffman, this next question is for you from Matt at William Blair.
You're still early in the core market opportunity as well as the cash app, but now that you've added AR automation, what's next in terms of adjacent opportunities to continue adding value for customers?
Great question. We're thrilled with the fact that we still believe we're in the early innings of the opportunity in our organic and category-leading space, the close process automation space. We're really, really excited about the addition of the TAM that we created, the adjacency with accounts receivable, specifically because it has very similar patterns to what we saw in the close process automation space. A lot of manual work still being done, a lot of things that are unsustainable that we can help modernize. Seeing those two things come together is a great opportunity for us. In terms of what's next, we do have aspirations to evaluate the additional adjacencies.
The only thing I can tell you is that it will be really in concert with our strategy. I think you've heard us talk at length about that, starting with my discussion, sort of defining the challenges and the complexity of the environment, the IT landscape, and the accounting environment facing the controller, especially at scale. I think Mark Partin highlighted that as well. What we get involved in next will likely be right in the sweet spot, serving the controller, creating the system of interaction, and modernizing the processes that the controller cares most about.
Thank you, Marc. Our next question is for Mark Partin from Josh Beck at KBCM.
Mark, on the target operating model, it looks like the long-term operating margin target is maintained relative to a prior investor day, but there were some minor changes on gross margin, sales and marketing, and R&D. Any notable drivers to highlight?
Yeah, thank you. That's right. Our target operating model, we feel confident for a number of reasons. Some of the changes have been that our additional investment in the platform in R&D, we believe, moved that number up over the longer term. We've been very excited about our strategy, about our need to move into adjacencies and continue to build and modernize the platform. From a target model standpoint, that was a difference. I think secondly, we're optimistic of our ability to maintain high gross margins in subscription. We're 87%.
As we move through our transition and get back to sort of turning off our private cloud, staying in the public cloud over time, we think that drives efficiencies over the longer term as well. We have seen consistent operating leverage in the sales and marketing through our business model, but also through our ecosystem and our partnerships, where our partnership with SAP helps drive operating leverage, and our partnership with these large partners that Mel talked about helps drive longer-term sales and marketing efficiencies. Our sort of longer-term model, we feel confident in some of those changes that we've talked about.
Thank you, Mark. This next question is for Pete. Pete, progress in matching is really impressive. More than 3 billion transactions in 2018, up to 10 billion in 2020, and now talk of 100 billion.
Can you provide more color on the linearity of getting from $10 billion to $100 billion? Does our installed base have that volume without any new local growth?
Yeah, great question. Yeah, we're very excited about the greater transaction volume we're seeing. In fact, that's a strategic part of our overall direction, moving more and more into the transaction flow, moving into payments, moving into the matching, our Account Analysis product that we're coming out with this year. It's a very strategic move, and our customers are talking to us more and more about the types of things that they want to do. We're seeing some of the biggest customers talk about these enormous volumes. We see that as an opportunity to provide the capabilities of the services that would help support that kind of a volume.
This is opportunistic to be able to go in and make sure that we can take on some of the big challenges and everything. Certainly, the move to the public cloud makes a big difference, provides a lot of the elasticity of scale that you can have so that you can scale up really big, you can scale back down, and you do not have to have the level of infrastructure that sits around waiting for things to happen because these kind of transactions come in peaks and flows. This is a big part of our overall plan, to make the investments now so that we can take advantage of these big transaction increases that we are seeing with our customers. Timing, who knows what the actual timing will be for when those come, but we want to be ready for that.
We do see big opportunities today with existing customers.
Thank you, Pete. This next question is for Mark Woodhams. Mark, you made a comment that the demand environment should get better throughout 2021. Could you expand a bit on what's driving that confidence and the puts and takes we're seeing in the market?
Sure. You're right. I keep saying, I believe I continue to see an improvement in the demand environment. There is a level of optimism within our sales engine. Some of the deals that stalled in March and throughout Q2 of last year are starting to come back. We're seeing that progress more and more. We're seeing regions that were hit harder by COVID, like EMEA, seeing an element of resurgence. We've got some larger transactions starting to grow, not only in our customer base, but also with new customers.
Our customers are telling us at the moment, excuse me, the momentum behind digital transformation is too large to deprioritize. Our partners are intimating that as well, talking about significant pipelines with transformation projects. When you bring all of that together, yeah, that's kind of where I'm coming from, or that is where I'm coming from. With that said, we're not actually in control of the timing of the demand curve. I'm just in control, or we are in control of our ability to execute our customer relationships and our sales capacity to operate that sales execution. I think the experience of the go-to-market team, our position in the market, our continued investment in product, our focus on customer, it leaves me with a level of confidence that we can execute well in an increasing demand environment.
Thank you, Mark. This next question comes from an investor. Marc Huffman, I'm going to open it to you, and then you can advise whether we want anyone else to dig a bit deeper. So many of their conversations in the software industry are suggesting that front-office solutions have been prioritized more highly during COVID and may continue to have priority over back-office in the next year or two. What are you observing in your conversation with customers? Do you think there is a catalyst available that would cause customers to invest more aggressively in back-office automation?
That doesn't sort of align with what we're observing in conversations we're having with our customers, but that may not be unique. The conversations that we're having with our customers are those larger customers who were on the course for or in the midst of a large-scale capital T transformation.
What we're hearing from our customers is the pandemic, the associated events that people needed to go through, closing their books for the first time with the distributed workforce, managing their bench amongst managing their P&L throughout an unknown duration of a crisis, and then going through their first audit in an entirely remote fashion, caused them to look at their initiatives and say, "This is something we just absolutely can't put off." Not really in a position to speak to how the front office is impacted by the pandemic. It wouldn't be shocking to me. History is full of times when people take chances to invest in front office things that are more revenue generators. The customers we're talking about are clearly returning to the table, prioritizing their initiatives around modernizing accounting, and we think we'll be the beneficiaries of that going forward.
This next question is for Kevin Kimber, and it comes from Matt at BTIG. Kevin, what types of learnings do you have with integrations and use cases of overlap customers between Remilia and BlackLine to accelerate cross-selling in both directions post-acquisition?
Thanks, Matt. Good question. I mean, I think the first and short answer is it's still early. We're only six months post-acquisition. I think where I'd focus first is to reiterate the synergy. If you think about the financial close process, the core processes that BlackLine have served for some time and are the market leaders in, typically the biggest thing that delays the financial close is either uncollected or unallocated cash. There's huge synergy between our technology automating accounts receivable and automating the financial close process and the value that that then brings customers.
In terms of the cross-sell opportunity within the customer base, then Remilia as a business was HQ'd in the U.K., and we have a strong footprint in EMEA, and therefore the ability to cross-sell BlackLine products into our customer base as underlined to the overarching BlackLine strategy to continue to grow and invest in international territories is very strong. In addition to that, from a Remilia perspective, selling into the North America territories with the distribution channel that BlackLine has very strongly across North America presents us with a significant opportunity. I think there's huge cross-sell opportunities, but it's still early in that cycle. It's still early for us to really assess, but the momentum continues to grow.
Thank you, Kevin. Our next question is going to be for Mark Woodhams, and it's also from Matt at BTIG.
Mark, what are some of the key drivers and/or metrics to decide when to invest in local market presence versus using partners or broader regional coverage? Actually, Mark Woodhams, why don't we start with you, and then we can have Mel add on as needed?
Okay. Interesting question, good question. I think that it's an area that we look at on a regular basis of when is the right time to enter a new market and in which way. From my perspective, I am looking for something that has a well-regulated environment. There isn't a lot of point being launched into a country whereby there is no regulation when I'm selling to that kind of environment. I need to make sure that there is a demand in the country, there is a capability in the country, and that our product fits well.
Then when we come to the choices of when we look to using an expansion of our partner network, or whether it's something where we want to organically put an investment into an office and into people locally, we go through a process of sizing the market, looking at whether we're fit for purpose, and then what the return from that market is going to be. Does it expand our opportunity in the short, medium, long term, and if so, what do we need to do to address it? In the past, I've addressed there are countries, I mean, as an example, there are somewhere in the region of 147 countries in EMEA that we could sell to, and I'm not suggesting that we're going to put offices in all of them.
There are a core 7 to 10 that we probably want a presence in at some point. The rest, I would serve through highly qualified, highly certified partners. I guess the last comment is it's something that we review on a regular basis.
Mark, this is Mel. Just to add to the answer, yeah, as Mark mentioned, we review these areas in the go-to-market meetings that we have and look at markets where we have presence and also markets where we potentially can sell either through the SAP relationship or the new solution provider relationship. Ability to sell is one aspect, but the other really important one is the ability to serve our customers, right?
That's why the partner enablement function has been an area of investment for this year and future years to ensure the partners have everything in their hands to be able to do as good a job or even better than BlackLine directly, right, in terms of implementations, customer success, renewals, customer satisfaction, all those pieces. Yeah, it's a joint effort, and we're going to continue to broaden the ecosystem to serve more and more countries if they're a good fit for us.
Thank you, Mel and Mark. Our next question is for Mark Partin, and it comes from an investor. Mark, now that you are highlighting TTM billings as a KPI versus revenue, is it safe to say you feel pretty good about billings trajectory in 2021?
Can you give us some color on how to think about growth in this metric and specific drivers, and also what about RPO as a KPI?
Let's stick with trailing 12-month billing. I think that's a metric that we're highlighting now for a number of reasons. RPO, I think, still contains a variability that we prefer to focus on revenue as a guide and billings as a metric for how things are progressing. I think it's uniquely now going to be helpful as we move through this year and look at last year because it's demonstrating a few things that are important to us. First, our ability to execute in market has never been better. We feel confident over the last 12 to 24 months as we've seen the demand environment move up in advance of the pandemic and our execution driving greater billings.
As we got into the pandemic, we were able to see the billings match pretty much the conversations we were having with our customers and what we were seeing in the market. We felt like if you look back over a 12-month period, you can see strong execution against a rising tide of demand, and then our business model from period to period, quarter- to- quarter, we can work through the variability with investors and talk about why we may be having that as we move through 2021.
It is a part of our optimism around our ability to execute in market, our confidence in the business model, and our expectation that we will have a rising demand environment as we move through this year, as indicated by some of the signals that some of the members of the team have talked about from conversations we're having, projects that we're seeing move, and that's given us that confidence in this year. Thanks for that.
Thank you, Mark. Kevin, this next question is for you, and it's a follow-up question from Rob Oliver at Baird. Kevin, you offered a very wide range of ARR for cash customers. Could you talk about the factors at play there, such as size of customer, land and expand? Anything else worth mentioning?
Sure. Yeah, very happy to.
I mean, in simple terms, it's fairly consistent with the standard SaaS approach in that some of that will be to do with, if you think about mid-market or enterprise, in a mid-market space, $50,000 ARR might be their entire volume, or indeed in the enterprise or very large enterprise space, it might be divisional. Typically what we'll see is a range of deals through the course of a year that may be land and expand on the big end. An organization will start with a division or a number of divisions or territories and then grow over time. You saw the slide earlier in my presentation where a specific customer we highlighted started at around $125,000 ARR, but the full potential in that client specifically is over $1 million of ARR. It really depends on the dynamics.
It depends on how many payments they want to automate through the system. Again, if you come back to the complexity that we're ultimately automating, many, many of our customers will be global in nature, very multi-divisional, and have grown through acquisition. As a result, we'll have acquired multiple ERPs, multiple banks, multiple languages, multiple currencies over time. Therefore, to automate that, some customers look to do that as part of one big bang of finance transformation. One of the customers I referenced that was the $700,000 ARR, that's 50% of their volume and 50% of their territories from the start. Some customers might say, "Let's start smaller than that and then grow into it over a number of years." We see huge opportunity both in terms of the enterprise-type large transaction upfront as well as land and expand over time.
That presents us with velocity in our pipeline to enable us to manage across the spectrum.
Thank you, Kevin. I think we have time for one final question. I am going to direct that to Mark Woodhams. Mark, this is a two-part question, and we have gotten it from a couple of investors, so I am going to combine. The first part is, can you provide an update on the competitive landscape? Anything changing in that regard? Then we will take a bit of a deeper dive into some of the competitors.
Okay. Yeah, for sure. Firstly, I guess I believe, or we believe that the pandemic is serving as a catalyst for our space. Overall, that is a really good thing for the market. That is a real positive. The competitive landscape has not really changed, though. Our biggest competitive loss remains a no decision-state status quo.
If you look at Q4, we continue to enhance our competitive position in the quarter with some very strong win rates and competitive takeaways. To answer the question, no, not really. I mean, we continue to invest in product. We commit to our customer success. We've got the experience of the GTM team. We believe we can execute. All of that helps drive that competitive distance. Yeah, but overall, no. I don't think it's changed particularly.
Okay, great. Diving in a bit deeper into some of the specific players in the space, do we see TrendTech or Flowcast any more or less frequently? Also, we've seen some questions about OneStream. Do we consider them as a competitor?
Let me try and get the order right. TrendTech, we do see them.
Probably not as often as I did a couple of years ago, actually, but we do see them. We win more than we lose, and fundamentally, that's down to the superior platform, superior vision that we have. Flowcast, yes, we see them. We see them at the low end of the market. If you remember our map playbook, which I spoke to, is aimed at that part of the market, and it's been driving some really great results around the shortening sales cycles and increased win rates. Yeah, we do see them, but in reality, they're low-end, and customers tend to use them as a bridge to a more sophisticated platform over time. From a OneStream perspective, we don't see them very often, and actually, if we do see them, then the conversation is normally about one of us is in the wrong place.
They're focused pretty much on consolidation into the Oracle base, which is a different sell to where we're playing. Was that all of them?
Yes. Okay, I think that concludes our 2021 BlackLine Investor Day. Thank you all so much for joining and for your continued support of BlackLine. We look forward to seeing you at future investor events. Thank you again.