Why Advertising Agencies Must Automate their Payables End-to-End

The importance of digitizing media payables end-to-end cannot be underestimated.

Automate Payables End-to-End But poorly integrated systems and processes across the invoice-to-pay lifecycle remains a challenge for many advertising agencies and media buying companies creating a barrier to digital transformation.

At some advertising agencies, digital invoice processing solutions feed a manual process. Other agencies must switch between several systems to process the invoices they receive from suppliers.

Processing invoices and supplier payments in a cohesive and seamless fashion helps advertising agencies and marketing companies address several key issues. One of the most important is the ability to transfer invoice data without the need for manual data entry or other human operator intervention. Another is the ability to track invoices from the time they are received from suppliers. In cases where invoices don’t match the orders in the media buying system (often caused by incorrect or missing data), or when business rules call for operator review, integration of end-to-end media payables workflows provides quick approvals with full control and complete transparency.

A new breed of cloud-based media payables solutions addresses this issue by providing an end-to-end platform that integrates invoice processing with upstream and downstream systems and processes. It’s easy now to directly connect invoice data capture and workflow approvals at every step of the process. Better connecting digital invoice processing with media buying systems, ERPs, and payment processing solutions improves efficiency and agility, and accelerates the approval of invoices. Agility is particularly important as campaigns are ever-changing and the ability to process any paper or electronic invoice, delivered through any channel, is a major process improvement.

How to automate media payables

End-to-end integration automates and simplifies what have been manual and time-consuming tasks that span the entire invoice-to-pay lifecycle (from invoice receipt through supplier payment).

This integrated functionality also improves the user experience across the invoice-to-pay lifecycle.

Buyer-seller experience
Seller invoice experience
Invoice-to-ERP integration experience
Reconciliation on the ERP experience
Payment experience
Vendor master data management experience

In many cases, an end-to-end media payables solution will provide the pre-built integrations and digital workflows that improve “time to approval” metrics and reduce costly manual tasks. Only the most experienced providers of cloud-based media payables solutions take things a step further and guarantee the time in which they will deliver invoice data and the accuracy of the invoice data that they capture. The best solutions use its integrated technology to proactively identify and resolve invoice defects. End-to-end integration also improves collaboration among all stakeholders and makes it easy for buyers to know where things stand in the process.

Tasks that benefit from end-to-end integration include:

Invoice posting
Exceptions resolution
Payments
Reporting

Best-in-class media payables solutions digitally transform the media invoice-to-pay lifecycle.

The benefits of media payables automation

Results from advertising agencies and media buying companies that have automated their invoice-to-pay lifecycle end-to-end are compelling. By managing all invoices in a system and eliminating the need to manually transfer data, one advertising agency alleviated a tremendous amount of work. This allowed the advertising agency to lower its costs and free up staff for higher-value activities.

For advertising agencies and media buying companies that want to automate their media payables end-to-end and derive the benefits described above, integration is critical. Without the right technology platform, processing media payables is still a mostly manual and time-consuming activity, no matter how good the upstream and downstream systems and processes around it.

If you are an advertising agency or marketing company that is looking to automate its media payables, IPS wants to speak with you!

We have helped seven of the eight largest advertising agency holding companies in the world automate their media payables, and we are confident that we can help your organization, too. Check out this Case Study!