← Projects

Blackline Reconciliation: Concur ↔ Citi Bank

An automated reconciliation pipeline matching expense transactions in Concur against Citi Bank statement data, removing a manual month-end reconciliation task.

Client
Atlassian (Remote)
Timeframe
September 2021 – December 2022
Stack
Workato, BlackLine, SAP Concur, Citi Bank, SFTP

The problem

Finance had to manually match corporate card transactions against expense reports every reporting period — the employee uses a Citi corporate card, Citi sends the card transactions, those get imported into Concur, and someone then has to verify the approved expenses actually match the bank data. Slow, error-prone, and a common source of month-end close delays at volume.

The approach

Built a Workato pipeline that automates the full corporate-card lifecycle and feeds structured transaction data into BlackLine, which handles the actual matching logic — BlackLine is a reconciliation-specialist tool, so the integration work was in getting clean, correctly-formatted data to it reliably at the right point in the expense lifecycle, not reimplementing matching logic.

Citi corporate card used Citi transactions imported into Concur Employee submits expense report
Approved expenses exported BlackLine reconciliation triggered Matched on ID / amount / merchant / date Exceptions queued, cycle finalized

What it does

  • Covers the full corporate-card lifecycle — card transaction import, expense submission, approval export, and reconciliation — as one connected flow rather than separate manual steps
  • Triggers the BlackLine reconciliation process automatically once approved expenses are exported from Concur
  • Matches Concur expense transactions against Citi Bank card transactions on transaction ID, amount, merchant, and date tolerance
  • Flags mismatches and exceptions in a controlled exception queue inside BlackLine's existing workflow, so accountants resolve them where they already work
  • Finalizes the reconciliation cycle automatically once all matches and exceptions are cleared

Outcome

Significantly reduced month-end reconciliation effort and improved audit readiness across Finance — the routine matching now happens automatically, and accountants only spend time on the transactions that genuinely don't reconcile.