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Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the second quarter 2021 Black Line Earnings Conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press the star then the one key on your touchtone telephone. If you recall our previous systems, please press star then zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker host, Alexander Geller. Vice President of Investment Relations at Blackline. Please go ahead.
Alexander Geller
Good afternoon, and thank you for your participation today. With me on the call is Mark Huffman, Chief Executive Officer of Blackline, and Mark Parton, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I would like to note that certain statements made during this call that are not historical facts, including those regarding our future plans, objectives, and expected performance, In particular, our guidance for Q3 and the full year 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 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 periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in particular, our Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. 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, except as required by applicable law. Unless otherwise stated, all financial measures disclosed on this call will be non-GAAP. A discussion of why we use non-GAAP financial measures and information regarding reconciliations of our GAAP versus non-GAAP results is currently available in our press release, which may be found on our Investor Relations website at investors.blackline.com or on our form 8K filed with the SEC today. Now I will turn the call over to Mark to begin.
Mark Huffman
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We delivered an outstanding second quarter. Building on last quarter's strong performance, we accelerated both billings and revenue growth. Our Q2 performance demonstrates the value we're bringing to the market is resonating now more than ever as more companies prioritize digital finance transformations. Underpinning this momentum is improving global demand, and with budgets for financial close management opening up, our sales team delivered another quarter of great execution across all areas of the business. Now let's dive into the highlights of the quarter. We continue to see an increasing trend of large digital transformation deals as budgets for finance transformation open back up and companies prioritize digital transformations. This large deal trend was consistent for both new business and account growth. And in Q2, we added a record number of large, quality new logos with the help of our partner ecosystem. Among our existing customers, we saw continued expansion of wallet share as our large customers grew larger still with upsells, cross-sells, and the addition of strategic products, specifically with uptake from transaction matching and our AR automation products. Our ability to serve the largest organizations has been a durable growth lever for us throughout the pandemic, and we saw that demand strengthen in Q2. We believe the depth and breadth of our offering puts us at a competitive advantage to lead the most complex and sophisticated organizations around the world to evolve their business and accounting processes. Another highlight for the quarter was Solex. which delivered its strongest quarter yet, showcasing the partnership's ability to drive strategic deals and international growth. Our Solex deals were large and strategic with broad geographic reach spanning APAC, EMEA, and North America. Solex was particularly strong across the APAC region, generating large deals and expanding our small but growing business in Japan. We are reaching the end of our third year with Solex, and we continue to expand the Solex accounts that we've captured through this partnership. We are seeing a lot of positive trends with Solex as we drive more enablement, expand our industry-specific collateral, and leverage SAP's RISE initiative. We believe we're well-positioned for continued momentum from Solex throughout the year. In Q2, we added a number of quality new logos as a result of strong global execution from the sales team. Our partner ecosystem was heavily involved upmarket with large SIs experiencing an uptick in the number of customers coming forward to discuss finance transformation projects or restart initiatives that were put on hold in 2020. In the mid-market, we continue to drive new wins with our modern accounting playbook offering, particularly now that financial close management is becoming an approved budgetary item for mid-market companies. Abroad, A continued macro recovery in certain key markets drove strong results for our international business. In both Europe and the Asia-Pacific regions, we're hearing that companies are motivated by digital transformation initiatives, standardization of accounting operations, and managing a remote close. This demand, combined with an increasing traction from our global partner ecosystem, drove strong wins abroad and grew our international revenue to 28% of the total, up from 25% the prior year. Demand for accounts receivable automation was strong with continued momentum for our AR automation offering. We increased the capabilities of our platform with the recent introduction of AR intelligence in March, and although it's very early, we're pleased to see initial traction with this product. We're on track to further deepen our AR automation offering with plans to release our next AR product in Q4 of this year. And, of course, we continue to drive success for our customers. Our customer success team is hard at work helping our customers optimize their Blackline instance with adoption and utilization workshops, self-service trainings, product support, and a vibrant Blackline community, resulting in happy, referenceable, and engaged customers. And with our growing strategic product portfolio, we continue to differentiate our offerings and grow the potential for expansion and uplift. We believe this momentum validates the mission-critical nature of finance transformation and Blackline's value proposition. We're hearing from our customers and our partner that demand for finance transformation is stronger than ever before. As the market leader, we believe there is a tremendous opportunity for us to capture that demand and stay ahead of it. So how are we going to do that? You've long heard us talk about our commitment to customer success. Over the years, we've invested millions of dollars in customer success by growing our success teams, driving education through workshops and training outreach, and increasing customer engagement with Beyond the Black, our modern accounting summits, and strategic client forums. As the market leader, we believe it's incumbent upon us to lead our customers to deploy more efficient and strategic accounting and finance processes. And we have found that companies around the world need our leadership now more than ever. With today's companies facing an acute talent shortage, executives are being asked to do more with the same or even fewer resources. This is where Blackline can really make the difference. We automate time-consuming and manual tasks to free up valuable finance and accounting resources. And even Blackline customers have considerable room to optimize their Blackline instances and drive greater automation and resource capacity. As such, the next stage of our investment in customer success is the recently introduced Blackline Optimization Academy. This is a culmination of the learnings we've uncovered from working with our largest and most complex customers. We have found what makes our customers most successful and distilled that information into training sessions that focus on nine foundational accounting processes to drive greater efficiency in automation with Blackline. These nine key accounting processes involve accruals, calculations, items, intercompany, amortization, clearing and suspense, subledgers, roll forwards, and cash, and are highly manual, time-consuming, and error-prone. While other vendors focus on one specific accounting process, leaving the rest in the manual world, Blackline's platform brings all of these discrete yet interrelated processes together to offer a complete solution with maximum integration and automation. The Academy will help us scale and reach a broader customer audience, as well as differentiate based on the completeness and depth of our integrated offerings. Our goal is to help our customers get full value out of Blackline while proactively engaging them earlier in their transformation journey rather than reactively when they encounter an issue. With more than 20 years of experience in our market, this commitment to customer success is a core tenet of our differentiation. We believe we are unique in our ability to take our customers on this journey from adoption to education and optimization. we've seen this model generate incredibly strong relationships with our customers, driving increased engagement and usage of our platform. And as customers gain value from Blackline, we see greater adoption and platform expansion as customers progress towards their long-term goals of digital finance transformation. Our ability to drive customer success and solve for resource capacity is resonating with companies of all sizes, but particularly for those at the highest end of the market. In Q2, we saw some of the largest companies around the world embark on transformation projects with Blackline. To name a few, a Fortune 200 technology company based in Hong Kong has a company-wide digital transformation mandate. Limited by Excel, manual processes, and in-house solutions, their chief digital transformation officer set up a task force to drive efficiency across their global finance team, increase transparency and visibility across shared services, and focus on strategic projects such as their S4 HANA migration. We were able to leverage our SAP relationship and one of our global SIs who is advising the company's executive stakeholders around their digital transformation roadmap to create a world-class solution that consists of 15 other finance initiatives and aligns with their corporate objectives to achieve lean, modern accounting. In Q2, this customer became our largest dealer quarter with the purchase of our finance transformation solution and our transaction matching engine to automate high volumes of reconciliations for accruals and other receivable accounts. Given the prioritization of finance transformation and the support of our partner network, the deal closed in a rapid five months. Although our relationship is just getting started, There are extensive plans to deploy across their global shared services organization and add additional products as they look to Blackline as the backbone of their finance transformation journey. A Fortune 20 retailer based in North America became a Blackline customer in 2017 with the purchase of our finance transformation solution and transaction matching. Over time, they rolled out to more users across their global accounting organizations. In 2020, this company brought on a new chief accounting officer, a former Blackline user at several prior companies, who recognized that they were not using Blackline to their full capability and made it his mission to turn their finance and accounting organization into a highly developed automated team with optimized business processes. Working with our customer success team, they identified 137 different use cases that could be automated with our matching and journals functionality on their first pass, such as cash depository, negative cash reclassification, tax reconciliation, and have since identified more opportunities for optimization. In the year and a half since this executive joined, they have significantly increased usage of our solution, resulting in exponential value for their organization. Next on the CAO's agenda was solving for the manual challenges around large and growing volumes of intercompany transactions. In Q2, they purchased our intercompany hub to establish and drive policy across their full scope of intercompany accounting transactions and drive reporting at a legal entity level. With this purchase, the retailer joins our growing list of customers spending $1 million or more in ARR with Blackline. A Fortune 400 pharmaceutical company headquartered in London first became a Blackline customer in 2019 with the purchase of our finance transformation solution. Over the past year, with strong partnering from EY, we were able to demonstrate significant ROI around efficiency, governance, and control. As a result, this company firmly declared that Blackline was indisputably at the heart of their future transformation, and in Q2, they expanded their Blackline footprint with additional users as they embark on a global rollout a black line across our global accounting and shared services organization. There are ongoing discussions for future expansion across the rest of our platform. As you can see, the depth of our engagement with our new and existing logos has generated significant value for our customers and yielded strong financial results for the quarter. And now, I'll turn it over to Mark Parton to discuss in more detail.
Mark Parton
Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone. Our strength in the quarter came from continued improvement in the global demand environment and solid sales execution. Our performance was strong across all areas of the business and drove a fourth consecutive quarter of acceleration in billings growth as well as acceleration in revenue growth to 23%. As a result, Q2 results came in ahead of expectation for revenue, profitability, and cash flow. Moving to our key performance for the quarter, We added 116 net new customers in the quarter for a total of 3,598 customers. Our strength upmarket generated a record number of new large deals for a Q2, as defined by $100,000 or more in ARR, with growth in average deal size benefiting from our Solex partnership, digital transformation, and continued adoption of our strategic products. Strategic products represented 18% of sales for the quarter, validating the strength of our platform and meeting our anticipated range of 15% to 20%. Our renewal rate was strong at a blended rate of 98% and even higher for the enterprise business at 99%. As we anticipated, our dollar-based net revenue retention rate remained flat at 106%. Partners were involved in more than 80% of large deals in the quarter, which is a great result and due to targeted efforts to increase engagement, build relationships, and drive greater utilization among our partner network, as well as improving market condition. We are seeing healthy growth across the board as our top partners continue to grow their black line practices to capitalize on the strong demand for our value proposition. Revenue from our SAP partnership totaled 25% of revenue up from 24% in the prior year. Gross margin remained at 80% within our target range and reflecting ramping costs associated with the planned Google Cloud migration and the integration of the Remilia acquisition. In Q2, we generated net income attributable to Blackline of $10 million. We generated $12 million in operating cash flow and $8 million in free cash flow due to higher-than-expected profitability and cash collections. We ended the quarter with approximately $1.17 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities. Turning now to guidance. For the third quarter of 2021, total GAAP revenue is expected to be in the range of $106.5 to $107.5 million. On the bottom line, we expect to report net income attributable to Blackline in the range of $7 to $8 million or 11 to 13 cents on a per share basis. Our share count will be approximately 62.5 million diluted weighted average shares. For the full year 2021, total GAAP revenue is expected to be in the range of 420 to $423 million. On the bottom line, we expect to report net income attributable to BlackLine in the range of 28 to $30 million or 45 to 48 cents on a per share basis. Our share count will be approximately 62.5 million diluted weighted average shares. In summary, we are very pleased to see another quarter of strong execution as demand for finance transformation gains momentum. Our performance throughout the first half of the year gives us increasing confidence in our growth initiatives and our ability to execute on them. We remain focused on capitalizing on the long-term opportunities for accounting transformation and driving further momentum in our business. As the market continues to recover, we feel good about Blackline's leadership position and our ability to capture the tremendous opportunity ahead of us. And now we'll take your questions.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press the star then the one key on your touchtone telephone. To withdraw your question, please press the pound key. Please sign by while we compile the Q&A roster. Now first question coming from the line of Rob Oliver with Baird. Your line is open.
Rob Oliver
Hey, great. Thank you. Good evening, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. First one is it was nice to see the new customer growth picking up in the quarter. So solid there. Wanted to get a little bit more color on that, Mark Huffman, relative to I know you mentioned a very strong quarter for large enterprises, and it seems like you guys kind of recovered a little bit of the map side from last quarter. So I wanted to touch on that. I also wanted to just ask about the net revenue retention, obviously in line with what you guys had expected, but there's been a lot of investments in getting the customers for upsell and cross-sell. And just curious how you guys are seeing that, Sounds like it's poised to be better in the second half, but how we should think about it. I know that's a backward-looking indicator. And how is the virtual selling motion going for you guys this year? And then I had a quick follow-up.
Mark Huffman
All right. Thanks, Rob. I'll handle maybe the first and third and let Mark talk about the net revenue retention. So I'd say it's a fairly broad-based performance. We're very, very pleased with new logo performance. And that's both mid-market and enterprise. Obviously, the mid-market, we're really focused on the modern accounting playbook. That's really going well for us. We had strength in enterprise, new customer acquisition, and then some nice size new customer lands there. And then there's several other dynamics that gave us what I thought was a really strong quarter there. In terms of, so I'd say it's our initiatives, which we continue to focus on, Modern Accounting Playbook, SOLEX, customer expansion initiatives, combined with a strong continued demand strengthening around us. Mark, you want to comment on net revenue retention?
Mark Parton
I do, yeah. Rob, thanks. You know, our net revenue retention rate, where it is today, is a function of last year, as you mentioned, prior to the pandemic. we had moved the retention rate up close to the 110, 111 number from approximately where it was today. We expect to see something similar to that trend, and it takes time. It doesn't all move in a quarter, but it moves over this 12, 13-month demand curve increase. So that number will continue to move up related to our investments in expanding within our existing accounts, the product portfolio growth, upsell that we're starting to see demand come back for. It'll take a little bit of time as we work through last year's pandemic.
Mark Huffman
And then lastly, Rob, I think you'd asked about the remote sales motion, and I would say there'd been really no material impact to us. Demand generation, remote selling, even remote delivery, we've continued to focus and execute on our initiatives there. And as we mentioned, we feel quite good about the performance we had in all of those dimensions in Q2.
Rob Oliver
That's great. I'm getting a little greedy here, I realize, because I squeezed a couple in. But, Mark Parton, on the second quarter in a row of really strong activity at APAC, and clearly you guys – your products are resonating over there, and I'm just curious. I know a lot of that's been partner-led, but is there going to be a need for any additional investment over there to kind of go after that as you think about the cost going forward? Thanks, guys.
Mark Parton
Yeah, thanks, Rob. You're right. It was a record quarter for us in APAC. We were seeing good traction in Japan with our entry there several years ago and starting to get traction. The leadership and investment that we've been making there is paying off with our team, and our partnerships. So when we see demand, we typically invest in it. So we're doing that in our geography. So to be able to step up to 28% international revenue mix, we think that's right on course with where we'd expect to be today.
Mark Huffman
And then, Rob, what I would say, you know, in terms of that international growth, Solex has been really beneficial for us there. We have another customer example we cite there from Southeast Asia. That relationship was really critical. That said, we continue to succeed with most all, including Oracle, major ERP players in those international regions as well.
Rob Oliver
Great. Thanks again. Thank you.
Operator
Our next question coming from the line-up. Matt Stadler with William Blair. Your line is open.
Matt Stadler
Hey, everybody. Thanks for taking my questions. And maybe just start with maybe one at a high level. I mean, it clearly seems like, you know, from your commentary and everything that's going on with the SOLEX and partners, that, as you said, this prioritization of finance transformation is clearly increasing. But as you think about the overall demand environment and, you know, especially the things that have been paused because of COVID-19, I mean, are we at pre-COVID levels at this point in terms of spending and demand that you're seeing outside of the kind of acceleration and prioritization of these initiatives, or do we still have some ways to go on that front?
Mark Parton
Yeah, I'll start. You know, just effectively a quarter, second quarter a year ago was our lowest point during the pandemic. So clearly we're getting the benefit of an increasing demand off of that low point. The first half of this year hasn't yet gotten to where we would think of as, you know, kind of a pre-pandemic level. It's faster in the first half. We've been more pleased and more successful with demand environment, and we're still looking to sort of getting back to a more normalized curve as we move through to the end of the year.
Mark Huffman
The only thing I would add to that is there's – Really no notion in our business now of impacted industries per se. We're seeing a good return of demand across the board. In the industries, perhaps a year ago, we would have labeled as under watch or potentially impacted, and we had programs to try to help those customers. That's behind us now, and so that's no longer a factor.
Matt Stadler
Got it, got it. That's helpful. And then maybe one on the, you know, Cariba partnership here. You know, it was interesting to see that announcement. I forget if it was earlier this week or last week. And then probably a little early to ask how it's going since it was just announced. But, you know, maybe from a higher level, when you think about, you know, the various functions in the office of the CFO, the treasury and the controllership, and Mark Parton, you know, I've talked about this a little bit in the past. But, you know, especially in the large enterprise segment of the market, those two roles have historically been somewhat separated. but they're increasingly becoming intertwined as back office integration and collaboration becomes increasingly necessary in the current environment. How do you think the relationship between those functions evolves over time and what does that mean for Blackline and for your overall market opportunity going forward?
Mark Huffman
Thanks for asking about that. We did announce the Kyriba partnership last week. It's one of the most recent partnerships we're we've announced and are focused on. It's really a customer-focused partnership. There's more value for our customers. And I think that what you were speaking to there in the question is the complexity in these finance and accounting technology landscapes and the better the technology works together across departments or across those functions in those continuous flow of information is what we are trying to achieve with this. If you think about bank connectivity as an example, really critical and important for large-scale organizations that do large-scale bank reconciliation functions. And even more valuable to those customers when you consider the work we do with them in AR automation. So between us and Cariba, we have many, many joint customers. This one is more about customer value than about something that we should be considering the monetization of.
Matt Stadler
Got it. That's helpful. Thanks again.
Operator
Our next question coming from the line of Matt Bentley with BTIT. Your line is open.
Matt Bentley
Yep. Hi. Thanks for taking the question. Great job on the quarter. I guess wanted to dig in a little bit. Mark, you mentioned that a number of deals that maybe were put on pause last year were starting to come back into the market. And I wanted to see if you could just elaborate on that a little bit in terms of, you know, how much of, or I guess how much of the pause last year are you starting to reconnect with? Are you seeing back in the market? And then looking forward, you know, how much is left? You know, how many opportunities do you think you can still sort of retrace for the back half of the year?
Mark Huffman
Well, I don't know that we want to get that specific in how many and how much pipeline that can be retraded. There's certainly a pent-up notion to what we've seen. And I would describe this as starting maybe in Q4, expanding into Q1. In Q2, as demand environment expands, you see these people returning to prioritizing these things. So certainly some of the experience that we had in a strong quarter in Q2 was based on that. Some of it was, you know, on the back of these big, more transformative things that would take some time. And, you know, some of those things were things that were paused. Equally as much, there was pipeline that was created during the pandemic that we were executing on and executed quite well on. And there's continued focus. I think this trend being at the early endings of a sustained investment cycle And accounting and finance automation with digital transformation is what's at play here.
Matt Bentley
Great. Very helpful. And then I guess as you think about, you know, a greater demand for projects in the finance and accounting department, but how much are the budgets growing? And maybe thinking about it in the context of, you know, are you landing a little bit larger than you have in the past or at least relative to last year? Are you getting greater attach rates of various modules up front, or are you still seeing sort of a smaller landing with the intention of expansion as they sort of work into it and things reopen a little bit more?
Mark Parton
Yeah, that's a great question because I think in two ways. First, in the enterprise, it's a bit of all of that, Matt. We've been seeing seeing accelerated growth in our strategic product portfolio now over these last three, four, five quarters as we've come out of the pandemic. Those attach rates are driven by our efforts and investment in digital transformation leadership, right? Our customer teams and our sales teams really helping our existing customers with that expansion and helping new customers with larger deals working with SAP and the Solex partnership to land with a real finance transformation solution that can be implemented and effective very quickly. Time to value and shortening that time to value is really important to us and the success of the customer and their ability to grow. So in the enterprise, Accelerated growth rates in our product portfolio is coming from both existing customers attached and also larger landing. We've had significant ARPU and deal size in our enterprise. Our average deal size in our enterprise today is 170,000, which is significantly higher over this last year or two related to our investments there. In the mid-market, we've begun the modern accounting playbook. number of quarters maybe only almost two years ago and the investment in that leadership is allowing attach rates and more products in the mid market and that we've seen also great acceleration and not just expansion once we land but also upfront with for example transaction matching and that's given us a lot of confidence that that digital transformation and that investment And our customers' growth is paying off. Wonderful. Thank you.
Operator
And as a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, to ask a question, please press the star, then the one key on your touchtone telephone. Our next question coming from the line of Alex Clark with Raymond James. Your line is open.
Alex Clark
Great, thank you. Mark, I wanted to ask about the SAP channel success. I know there's been a lot of investment there in terms of enablement of SAP reps. I think you talked about more vertical packaging through that channel. I'm sure there's even more that's kind of gone into it. Can you just give a little bit more color on what's kind of been working there? It sounds like demand's been great, but in terms of kind of the SAP selling motion and the enablement side from Blackline, just give a little bit more color on where you've had some success. Thanks.
Mark Huffman
Yeah, thank you, Alex. That's an area we've been investing for some time. And, you know, at some point, it's like pushing a rock up the hill at the early side, and at some point, you start to build momentum from it, and you get really good at it. And I feel like, you know, we're near that point. It was our strongest quarter yet. Strong logo ads, continued benefiting from the expansion opportunities of the customers that we have landed. And then on the same sort of path that we take customers that are direct black line customers. We've benefited from the expansion there. It's increasingly bringing us some more strategic deals, bigger international wins than we would previously have. We've had, I think, two quarters in a row where some of the customers that we focus on in the stories in our remarks have been Solex wins internationally. We've also seen us as the beneficiary of their RISE initiative, keeping in mind that RISE initiative is where they've taken and tried to package up their leadership on how to get people to the cloud, and they're really getting good at pitching that with Blackline as sort of a prerequisite towards moving towards the cloud. And all of this culminating in a great quarter for us, and they recognize that. They awarded us their pinnacle award. award of Solex Partner of the Year recently.
Alex Clark
No, that's great. Good color. So the other thing in the prepared remarks, a lot of color about the Optimization Academy, customer success. And so sticking with that theme, I wanted to ask about I saw the launch of your first catalyst that I know you talked about at the user conference last year around bank reconciliations. So can you just remind us on the strategy there, I think, following on the success of MAP and what's been the early feedback or adoption?
Mark Huffman
Sure. So this is a great question. There's a lot to it, so bear with me. What we're trying to do here is really differentiate Blackline based on our depth, on our breadth, and our customer centricity. We feel like those three things are are the things that make us different from all others. We're the leader in the category with more experience than anybody else, and it's deep. The Optimization Academy is just one way we're sort of capitalizing on that. Again, more experience than anyone else, very customer-centric brand. So we've launched our first one, very pleased. We had 15 customers participate, 60 actual participants. These are arranged to help people understand that depth and breadth across those nine core accounting processes and how Blackline can further expand their journey and take them from where they are, which many of those customers are very happy Blackline customers, but to complete that view of those nine accounting processes on Blackline and modernizing those things. We just feel like that really highlights the depth, breadth, and customer centricity of Blackline.
Alex Clark
Okay, great. Thank you.
Operator
And our next question, coming from the lineup, Andrew Degaspary with Barenburg. Your line is open.
Andrew Degaspary
Thanks for taking my question. I had a follow-up in terms of the net retention rate. I know you mentioned it's a 12-month metric, but I was curious, for this year, if we were to exclude, you know, let's say the worst two quarters, I mean, Would you say generally that metric is already above this level and that's why you're confident it's going to take up?
Mark Parton
Yeah. In the last two quarters, the demand that we've seen returning and also less pandemic risk within the accounts that we saw at the height of the pandemic last year Both of those things are yielding higher growth return within our own account base in the last two quarters. So we can shed, as we move forward, some of the last year's impact on that. We're already starting to see it's a blended metric in mid-market and enterprise. We're already starting to see lift in the enterprise base alone. The important thing about this metric is that it moves slower. And as we move over the next year or two, we're really excited about the tools that we have to drive it, more strategic products and interest and accelerated growth there than ever before, and that we have investments in customer success teams and optimization teams that help companies get that and utilize our products and engage better and grow and expand faster. So the opportunity to really move that metric over the longer term With the demand returning, we think we'll start to see that within that 12 to 18-month timeframe.
Andrew Degaspary
That's helpful. And then secondly, on your accounts receivable product, just wondering if you can maybe share with us some, you know, how's that asset been growing since you acquired them, particularly in the last quarter or so? And then secondly, you know, should we expect that growth to accelerate once you release the product in Q4? and that's why you have your eye on 2022, or are you holding back? Is there a reason you might be holding back a little bit in terms of deploying it to your channel?
Mark Parton
Great question, and I'll start with just the nature of that company when we acquired it was not going to be material to this year's revenue. It's a $10 million to $15 million annual run rate business, a great group of customers and employees. But given the nature of purchase accounting, we won't see a material impact in this year. So that's why we talked about 2022. As we get through a full year cycle, we can begin to bill and revenue this on a normalized basis. So we'll see more growth from it next year than we are this year, which is not that material. On the integration of the business and our ability to up and cross-sell that, we're out of the gate much stronger than we expected to be. As we've used our sales team and our distribution channel to really take this great product and put it around the globe, it's taken a little bit of time to get to where we want to be, and that's why we thought it would be sort of a year or two before we can really hit our stride. But again, in the last three quarters that we've been operating with it, it's out faster than we expected, but still yet immaterial to the overall market. operations for the quarterly performance.
Andrew Degaspary
Great, thank you.
Operator
Our next question coming from the lineup, Madcast with JP Morgan. Your line is open.
Matt
Good afternoon. Mark Huffman, with the work that you talked about your customer success teams doing, do you have any metrics you can share, like the growth in referenceable customers or NPS scores? or at least talk about how these are trending and how you see the trajectory going forward?
Mark Huffman
It's a great question. Thank you, Matt. The end result eventually will end up in net revenue retention metrics. The rest of the sort of categories you described there are not categories we disclose. I think we're pleased with our efforts there. We see benefits in NPS, customer sat. We see benefits in the volume of transactions being pushed through some areas that we look in there in terms of matching journal entries processed, amount of cash that moves through the AR collection engine as sort of outputs from some of those efforts as well. So trends, generally speaking, positive across the dimensions you would consider there. Nothing more descriptive that we're prepared to share with you.
Matt
That's helpful. Thank you. And then one for Mark Parton. So billing is obviously very strong this quarter. You know, the Fortune 200 deal, I don't know how much that influences billings, but to the extent that you can describe or share, were there any deal pull-forwards or something that closed earlier than expected? And then perhaps if you could provide some guardrails on billings growth going forward. Thanks.
Mark Parton
Yeah, thank you. Great question. I'll qualify my answer first by saying we still and always do expect to see variability quarter-to-quarter. on the billings metric. We will see seasonality in Q3 oftentimes, and so we have a very pragmatic view of what that looks like from quarter to quarter. In the trailing 12 months, we stepped it up to 24%. If you go back and look, when we were pre-pandemic, we were seeing high 20s in the calculated billings on the quarterly basis that had given us somewhere in the high 20s for trailing 12 months. So we really asked to focus more on a little bit of a trend. As we look at Q2, there was no one customer or event pull forward, lag over from previous quarters. It was just a true and honest demand-driven, incredibly well-executed quarter. We've had strong Q2s in the past, pre-pandemic, through our partnership ecosystems and some of the buying behavior. So we were thrilled to see the demand and the execution come together so well in Q2, and no anomalies exist in that number.
Matt
Thank you.
Operator
And the last question will come from Brent Rensselaer with FICO Sandler. Your line is open.
Brent Rensselaer
Hi, this is Clark Jeffries on for Brent. I wanted to touch on the announcement during the quarter to expand the partner program. Just wondering if there was a specific catalyst for that decision and maybe if possible, is there a specific area in the partner network that you're most excited to see develop over the next year?
Mark Huffman
I would say that was a momentum release that we were talking about. We were bringing together many things. Some of them had been previously announced under the The introduction of melazolidon as an additional leader to that channel. So the fact that we put that out there shouldn't be something that's eye-catching in itself. It captured a number of areas where we continue to focus. You know, I would say Solex is a real primary focus area. As I mentioned earlier, strong quarter for us, strongest, and yet we still think there's plenty of room to expand and succeed there. The SI ecosystem, as we talked about, those partners were engaged in 80% of our large sales, clearly something we're really focused on. And then the continued technology partnerships like these customer relationship partnerships that we highlighted with the announcement of the Kyriba partnership that were focused on real great value and how Blackline and the partner fit into this complex landscape that these large organizations manage on their accounting and their financial architecture.
Brent Rensselaer
Great. And then I was wondering maybe if we could get an update on product innovation. I mean, obviously a highlight during the analyst day, you know, talking about accelerating investment in R&D, relief schedules, and, you know, taking the processing power of the platform to 100 billion scale. So are there some key targets on the product side that we should be looking for over the next year? And is there anything you can update us on the pace of GCP migration?
Mark Huffman
Sure. And GCP would be a great example of that. So I'll start there. Pleased with the progress that we have in our GCP migration. Phase one, we started by taking new customers live in the Google Cloud on our systems. that's been successful for us. Phase two, we have 200 organizations who have migrated, we've migrated to the Google Cloud successfully. Phase three includes our EMEA build-out, which is on track. And we believe that, and I think it's important to keep in mind the nature of what we do, the importance of what we do, and our customer centricity means that this is a real contemplated move that will take place throughout the rest of the year and into 2022 for us to complete that. That frees up a lot of product innovation and acceleration for us with access to more service-oriented things that we get from the Google Cloud. In addition to that, we've had a lot of innovation in the AR side of our business. We announced the AR intelligence solution, which uses the real-time data powerful analytics and give some of our customers just a better understanding of the risk that they're exposed to, payment behaviors to help them manage that risk and cash flow. We have another release coming up in the AR world here in Q4 that we're really excited about, which we believe will put us in a position of having the most complete platform for AR automation very soon in the future. And then we continue to invest in the other two parts of our product focus, the core closed process automation that we category lead. We'll have a much more detailed discussion about this as we get into our conference, but the full release of account analysis, which drives a lot of value in the specificity at the transaction level that I think that is really a differentiator for us, as well as our focus on intercompany and the leadership that we're taking in intercompany governance and transactions.
Brent Rensselaer
Thank you very much.
Operator
I'm not showing any further questions. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Mark Hoffman, CEO, for closing remarks.
Mark Huffman
I want to thank you all for tuning in and joining us today. We always appreciate your ongoing support of Blackline and are focused on our customers. We always want to continue the tradition established by our founder, Therese, reminding all of you who are in the financial world to continue to refer your portfolio companies to Blackline, where we'll do a great job of helping them modernize their accounting processes. Again, thank you very much, and we'll chat with you all later.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, that ends our conference for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
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