It is no secret that advertising finance, just like any other area of the media industry, faces multiple challenges, most of them related to the constantly evolving market. What worked yesterday may not work today, resulting in an ever-changing landscape influenced by digital transformation, regulations and consumer demands.
Legacy architecture with disconnected data and systems is often a barrier that holds organizations and their staff back, forcing them to fulfil repetitive manual tasks that take up their time and inhibit their productivity. As a result, customers are no longer satisfied with the speed with which they receive quotes, which can significantly impact profitability.
While this most directly affects those responsible for ad sales and planning, ad sales finance teams are not immune to the effects of the media industry. After all, finance departments are responsible for the end product of ad sales, as they drive the financial future of ad operations and the overall trajectory of a company. However, the unique state of the industry makes it challenging to fully understand the fundamentals, which historically have been maximizing advertising revenue, leaving some CFOs on the hook.
If this is your situation, we’ve got you covered. Here’s an overview of how you can manage all your financial activities from a central hub through a Salesforce-powered ad management solution.
Simplified billing and invoicing
Billing media campaigns can be straightforward as long as there is only one debtor. When two or more debtors pay different percentages of an invoiced amount, the situation becomes much more complex. This often requires the creation of multiple media campaigns, leading to manual calculation of new percentage-based selling prices and repetitive tasks that only result in inaccuracies and loss of overview.
If the above sounds familiar, you will be pleased to know that with ADvendio’s finance hub it is possible to get an overview of all invoices for a given billing period, as well as easily locate the required documents through our invoice search function for smooth billing runs. Leveraging automation and lightning wizards, you are also able to optimize key billing operations for effortless bulk processing, all while managing audits, reports, renewals, commitments and more, from one location.
Similarly, ADvendio’s invoicing module allows you to create pre-invoice records with a single click containing the respective delivery data, payment interval and terms, and recipient information, as well as to automatically create and send invoices.
Thanks to the flexibility of our solution, you can leave your disconnected legacy systems behind while easily integrating ad tech platforms, ERP and accounting systems, such as SAP and Sage, streamlining the entire campaign process from booking to billing. Automatically receive periodic reports with key performance data, such as impressions or ad clicks, for seamless billing across all your connected systems.
Streamlined finance operations
At the end of each month, publishers, advertisers and agencies must generate reports on all campaigns, products, channels and clients to ensure timely payment of outstanding fees for work performed to ensure accurate accounting records at the end of the financial year.
Therefore, it becomes crucial to ensure the accuracy of regular invoicing processes throughout the year. Without the right processes and systems in place, this can be an arduous task for finance and accounting teams due to the manual effort required to align information from multiple Excel spreadsheets for each campaign, channel and client.
ADvendio’s advertising management software assists you at every stage of the advertising finance process. From responding to clients’ requests to creating proposals, through launching campaigns and sending invoices. By using automation, you can stop spending time on unnecessary steps and focus on the most important parts of your business.
Thanks to features such as ADvendio’s mass invoice creation, it is also possible to generate invoices for different accounts at the same time and send multiple emails to the respective recipients with just a few clicks, which can significantly increase efficiency for finance teams.
To top it off, you can be confident that your business is future-proved to scale globally, benefiting from multi-company, multi-currency and multi-lingual control configurations with country-specific rules, while effortlessly ensuring financial compliance against international legislation with ADvendio’s comprehensive financial capabilities.
Advanced accounting rules
Accounting rules allow publishers and agencies to pre-populate financial records through intelligent automation based on pre-defined rules. This facilitates the creation of financial records that can be easily transferred to existing accounting and ERP systems. The account determination procedure then informs rules for internal cost centers and expense & revenue accounts, thereby streamlining cost center management, revenue recognition and VAT, among other processes.
Our advanced accounting rules have a simple, guided configuration that can be applied to data management, making it easy to compare actual vs billed revenue. While the use of delivery data guarantees accurate calculation and simplified invoice creation thanks to integrations with leading ad tech platforms and accounting systems.
By following the guided configuration process, cost and profit center information can be tracked for multiple product lines, and third-party revenue share can be split with ease. Yet another example of how you can simplify large-scale data management through automation and accurate processes.
Automated actionable insights
It is not uncommon for many companies in the advertising industry have settled into traditional methods when it comes to managing their finances. Manual spreadsheets and other “workarounds” become the standard, and finance departments begin to resend inefficient and time-consuming workflows.
This often happens because they fail to consider that with the right OMS solution, it is possible to have end-to-end visibility into advertising data across all departments, including finance operations. With all this information at your fingertips, customized dashboards and analytics can become an effective tools for gaining a complete picture of both client ad specs and performance. Maximizing the effectiveness of campaign planning by analyzing advertising financial data after billing.
In addition, thanks to integrated ad servers and exchanges, agencies, publishers, advertisers and media companies can automatically receive regular reports with information on the performance of their direct and programmatic campaigns. These reports will contain key data such as ad impressions or clicks, which are important for billing and accounting purposes.
Say goodbye to multiple systems and complex data transfers. With ADvendio, your data is stored in a safe central database and all departments work in the same system. This way, you benefit from a consistent data flow throughout the sales, ordering and invoicing process.
Enhanced commitments fulfilment
The use of multiple ad exchanges and ad servers often results in a fragmented view of customer fulfilment, as there is little transparency on what ad inventory the customer has purchased and at what price. With ADvendio, pricing agreements and contracts can be tracked in real-time while automatically calculating the price per item. In addition, fulfilment visibility is available for each engagement at any time.
With our contract commitment capabilities, it is possible to structure all advertising finance agreements between you and all parties you do business with. Easily establish the planned advertising spend or turnover required to set agency commissions and profits while guaranteeing a seamless and accurate calculation of revenue share or per-unit payout to individual content owners.
Ultimately, by agreeing on financial terms with third parties at an early stage and simply entering them into the ADvendio system, you can ensure consistent and transparent monitoring throughout the life of all your contracts for bulletproof relationships and maximized revenue.
So does your business need an all-in-one advertising finance hub?
If you’re struggling with any of the challenges mentioned above, you’re also losing revenue. With the right system in place, media companies can experience improvements in accounting cycles, finance teams can be relieved from tedious tasks, and advertisers will be satisfied with their experience.
In summary, ADvendio’s finance hub enables publishers and agencies to efficiently manage the entire advertising finance process, from order to invoice. Featuring sophisticated automated billing capabilities, our Salesforce native solution frees up your finance department’s time and effort so they can focus on bigger tasks and plan for business success.
To learn more about how ADvendio can help streamline your business processes through a comprehensive billing and accounting management solution, request a demo today or simply use the contact us form to get in touch.
