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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.