BlackLine, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the first quarter 2020 Black Line Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Alexander Geller, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for your participation today. With me on the call is Therese Tucker, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Blackline, Mark Huffman, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Mark Parton, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I would like to note that certain statements made during this conference call that are not historical facts, including those regarding our future plans, objectives, and expected performance, In particular, our guidance for Q2 are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call. While we believe any forward-looking statements we may make are reasonable, actual results could differ materially because the statements are based on our current expectations as of today and are subject to risks and uncertainties. including those stated in our report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as risks related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the related responses by government and private industry, including macro and regional economic risks. We do not undertake and expressly disclaim any obligation to update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, Thank you for joining us. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today.

Let me start off by saying that our thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected by the coronavirus pandemic. At Blackline, our top priority has been and will continue to be ensuring the health and safety of our employees, customers, and partners around the world. Blackline responded quickly to the pandemic by creating an executive task force to monitor the COVID-19 situation daily. We immediately restricted non-essential travel and enabled work-from-home protocols. Shortly thereafter, and in line with the guidance provided by government agencies and international world health organizations, we restricted all travel, mandated a work-from-home policy across our global workforce, and moved all in-person customer-facing events to virtual ones. To enable collaboration, we have frequent team check-ins and utilized collaboration tools. I'm pleased to report that Blackline was able to rapidly shift to a distributed work environment with minimal disruption to our business operations. We have continued to provide strong customer service and support levels consistent with our unique Blackline culture. With the onset of the pandemic, many accounting and finance organizations suddenly found themselves shifting to a remote workforce for the first time. Most of these teams are in the office daily, and even a small handful of staff offsite or unable to work could have an adverse impact on closing the books. To further complicate matters, tax incentives and other regulatory items are changing frequently. Sometimes on a daily basis, which is impacting key business assumptions and forecasts. Last but not least, audits must now be conducted remotely as well. This situation becomes exponentially more complex for large multinational organizations who are managing the close manually. Throughout this time, our commitment to serve our customers has grown stronger than ever. At Blackline, we wanted to do more to help our community of Global Accounting and Finance Professionals in these challenging times and we quickly responded with COVID-19 customer relief programs. The first was announced on March 24th when we granted free access to our entire training library. This includes CPE eligible courses so CPAs can keep their accreditations current at no cost, saving accounting professionals hundreds or even thousands of dollars. We added a new curriculum with live virtual trainings focused on closing in a remote workforce environment. From a product perspective, we also offered the task management and reporting complimentary for six months to existing customers to enable a more effective remote close. In addition, we announced complimentary one-on-one coaching sessions with Blackline subject matter experts so customers can optimize their existing Blackline instance in this challenging environment. The following week, we formally launched our Modern Accounting Playbook, or MAP, to help mid-market companies get up and running quickly on Blackline. MAP incorporates all of the best practices we have learned from over 1,400 mid-market companies. We also offered complimentary implementations for a limited time to reduce the burden on mid-sized companies who have less access to capital in these difficult times. The week after that, Blackline unveiled its Resource Hub for Closing Virtually to help finance and accounting professionals worldwide navigate the challenges surrounding this pandemic. The Resource Hub is available to all finance and accounting professionals regardless of whether they are a Blackline customer or not. It provides insight, guidance, and leading practices from both Blackline and our partners to enable companies to close with confidence in this new virtual world. The response to these relief measures has been very strong. We've had nearly 300 CPAs enroll in more than 700 CPE classes, and that number continues to grow on a weekly basis. More than 30 of our customers have taken advantage of our free task management and reporting products, with half already implemented and realizing value from the addition of those products. In the mid-market, we've seen interest in our MAP solution and have already filled 25% of the capacity for our complementary MAP implementations. Blackline's relief efforts are really resonating with our customers, and many have provided feedback Thank you so much for joining us. to help with the COVID-19 crisis. From food banks to donations to checking in on neighbors and vulnerable individuals, this outreach further reinforces Blackline's core value to serve. While these times are trying for all of us, we have confidence that our customers and Blackline will emerge stronger, and we're working hard to ensure that. I am really proud of our leadership team Their dedication to our customers and their focus on the safety of our employees. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Mark Huffman to discuss our recent business performance.