FloQast vs BlackLine vs Adra: Close-Management Pricing Playbook

Three vendors run the financial close for most mid-market and enterprise accounting teams in the United States: FloQast, BlackLine, and Trintech Adra. All three sit on top of your ERP, run the close checklist, reconcile the balance sheet, and leave an audit trail your external auditor can follow. None of the three publishes a price list. That fact shapes everything in this playbook: the numbers below are either the one starting figure a third-party pricing page discloses, or purchase-data medians and averages from buyer datasets, each labelled with its source. Where no figure exists, this guide says so instead of filling the gap with a guess.

The comparison matters because the close is where accounting time actually goes. Close-management software attacks that slowness directly: a central checklist assigns every task to a preparer and a reviewer, reconciliations tie to the general ledger (GL) in the tool, and exceptions surface as work items.

What each vendor actually sells

FloQast sells three packages on its pricing page, opened 14 November 2026. Close Management bundles the close checklist, account reconciliations, accounting operations, projects, an AI assistant, and ERP integration. Close AI adds AI agents, AI matching, automated reconciliations, and journal entry posting. Risk & Compliance covers controls, audit readiness, enterprise risk management (ERM), and operational audits and testing, and it is available on its own or with any Close package.

BlackLine sells the broadest platform of the three. Its financial close page, opened the same day, lists eleven modules: Account Reconciliations, Transaction Matching, Journal Entry, Journals Risk Analyser, Verity Accruals, Smart Close for SAP, Account Analysis, Consolidation, Reporting & Analysis, Task Management, and Compliance. Consolidation is the module the other two do not match: balance aggregation, ownership interest calculations, intercompany eliminations, and group-level statements inside the same platform. Task Management tracks thousands of tasks from a configurable command centre. What BlackLine does not sell is a starting point: its pricing page returned an HTTP 500 error when opened on 14 November 2026, and no list price appears anywhere else on its public site.

Adra is Trintech's mid-market close suite, and verifying that ownership matters because Trintech also sells Cadency, its enterprise tier. The Adra Suite page, opened 14 November 2026, names five modules sold individually or as a suite: Adra Matcher for multi-way transaction matching, Adra Balancer for balance-sheet reconciliations, Adra Task Manager for checklists and close task libraries, Adra Analytics for close reporting, and Adra Journal Entry for journal creation and posting with two-way ERP communication. Adra Matcher runs one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many matches on raw data. Like the other two, Adra publishes no price.

The pricing evidence that actually exists

The only list price attached to any of the three is a third-party one. G2's FloQast pricing page, last updated 28 July 2026 and opened 14 November 2026, lists one pricing edition starting at $999 per month, with no free plan and no free trial. G2 also reports reviewer averages for FloQast: two months to implement, 11 months to return on investment, and an average discount of 12 percent.

Purchase-data benchmarks give the realistic range. Vendr, which reports medians from actual purchases, puts FloQast at $24,663 per year across 316 purchases, per figures checked 12 November 2026. SpendHound, which reports averages, puts FloQast at $43,303 per year for companies with 50 to 1,000 employees and $74,448 above 1,000 employees. The same data puts BlackLine at $45,515 per year for the smaller band and $703,918 for the larger band, and Trintech at $71,819 and $271,885. Two cautions travel with these numbers. First, medians and averages disagree by design: a few very large contracts pull an average far above the median, so a FloQast median near $25,000 and a mid-market average near $43,000 can both be correct. Second, SpendHound's Trintech figure never separates Adra from Cadency: no Adra-specific benchmark exists, so do not budget Adra at $71,819.

Worked math 1: annual cost at stated entity counts

Price per entity is the honest unit for a close tool, because the workload scales with legal entities, not with seats. FloQast states it does not charge per user, which makes the per-entity view the right one for all three. Take a stated scenario: a company with five legal entities, one ERP, and an eight-person accounting team closing monthly.

At five entities, BlackLine's small-band average runs about 1.8 times FloQast's median. At 25 entities, FloQast's median becomes $987 per entity per year, while BlackLine's enterprise-band average becomes $28,157 per entity per year. That second number is not like-for-like: the enterprise average is pulled upward by a small number of very large contracts, and it buys consolidation, intercompany, and Smart Close for SAP that FloQast does not offer. The point stands: below roughly ten entities the two vendors compete on close management and the price gap is modest; above twenty entities you are paying for consolidation and multi-ERP control.

Adra has no number here: no Adra-specific benchmark exists, so ask Trintech to price the five modules for the same five-entity scope and confirm in writing whether the quote is Adra or Cadency.

Vendor time-savings claims are customer stories, not guarantees, and this guide uses them only inside an explicit formula with stated assumptions. Trintech publishes three Adra customer figures on its own pages: a customer that trimmed its close by 3 to 4 days from 11 business days, Binswager Glass cutting monthly reconciliation time from about 40 hours to 20 to 25 hours, and Marginalen Bank saving 50 to 70 percent of reconciliation time. Take the middle of the close-compression claim, 3.5 days saved per close, and a six-person close team at a fully loaded cost of $60 per hour, eight hours a day:

That $120,960 is gross time value, not cash saved: it becomes cash only if the freed days are redeployed to analysis, controls, or headcount avoided. Run the same formula with your own headcount and loaded rate; the ROI calculator in this series runs the same break-even arithmetic for any capital decision.

Cost per close day saved turns the subscription into the same unit as the benefit. Using the same 3.5 days per close, 42 saved days a year:

Both numbers sit far below the $2,880 value of a saved close day, which is why close software clears a return-on-investment test so easily on paper. The test that actually fails is adoption: a tool that saves 3.5 days on paper and two days in practice still pays, but a tool the team abandons after one close pays nothing. G2's FloQast reviewer average of 11 months to ROI is the number to plan around, not the vendor's best customer.

The decision table: who should buy which

The ERP decides faster than the feature list. FloQast lists NetSuite, SAP, Workday, Microsoft, Sage Intacct, and Xero; BlackLine's Smart Close runs inside SAP. FloQast states its own customers go live in 1.7 months on average against five months for BlackLine, with no sample size or method given — verify it in reference calls. The QuickBooks vs Xero comparison covers the small-business ERP layer underneath all of this: if the ERP itself is the bottleneck, no close tool fixes it.

Operator boundaries: what each tier does not do

FloQast Close Management is a checklist and reconciliation layer, not an ERP. It does not replace the GL, and its AI assistant answers questions and prepares work — the agents, AI matching, and automatic journal entry posting sit in Close AI, a separate package. A buyer who watches an agent demo and signs for Close Management has bought the wrong package. Confirm in writing which package the quote covers.

BlackLine's breadth is also its cost driver. The platform assumes a dedicated administrator and a controls environment: task management across thousands of tasks, segregation of duties, and role-based sign-offs only pay off when there are enough entities and enough people for the control structure to matter. A ten-person team on one ERP buys administration overhead it does not need. The enterprise-band average of $703,918 a year is the warning label: BlackLine's price scales with transaction volume and module count.

Adra's boundary is the AI question. Trintech has announced flux and variance analysis agents on its AI platform, but neither announcement states whether those agents run in Adra, in Cadency, or in both. A buyer shown an agent demo must ask, before signing, which product the agent ships in. Ask each vendor to show the audit log for an AI-drafted reconciliation — the draft, the inputs, who changed it, and who signed — on a demo tenant.

Execution checklist: buying a close platform in 30 days

• [x] Write the one-line scope: ERP, legal entity count, monthly reconciliation count, SOX date. That line picks the shortlist from the decision table above.
• [x] Get the auditor's evidence list first: ask your external audit senior what they need to see for AI-drafted reconciliations before any vendor demo.
• [x] Request two written quotes: FloQast and one of BlackLine or Adra, for the same entity count and scope, with the AI package named as a line item.
• [x] Force the Adra question: ask Trintech in writing whether the quote is Adra or Cadency, and which AI agents run in Adra.
• [x] Force the FloQast package question: ask whether the quote is Close Management or Close AI, and which add-ons sit outside the base price.
• [x] Price the exit: ask every vendor for a full export of reconciliations, sign-offs, and AI drafts in an open format, and test it on a demo tenant.
• [x] Run one parallel close: run the new tool alongside the old process, following the five-step protocol below, before switching any account group to the new tool.
• [x] Re-price at renewal: check the annual increase clause in the quote — and budget the year-two number, not the year-one teaser.

The parallel-close protocol

1. Freeze the scope — one account group, one month, AI matching off.
2. Run both processes — the new tool and the old spreadsheet side by side.
3. Compare match rates by hand — review every exception the tool auto-matched.
4. Switch matching on — for that one account group only.
5. Sign off or roll back — the auditor reviews the evidence trail before the next group goes live.

The bottom line

FloQast is the buy for the mid-market NetSuite or Sage Intacct team approaching SOX: the lowest benchmarked price, the clearest package structure, and a controls module from the same vendor. BlackLine is the buy for the multi-entity, multi-ERP enterprise that needs consolidation and intercompany inside the close platform, at a price that reflects that scope. Adra is the buy for the mid-market team that wants to purchase close automation module by module, with the strongest published customer time-savings figures of the three — and the weakest pricing transparency, since no Adra-specific benchmark exists at all. None of the three publishes a price, so the discipline is the same for all of them: scope the workload in writing, get two quotes, and name the AI package as a line item. The automated bank reconciliation playbook in this series covers the matching engine underneath all three platforms.