Reconcile Media Payments and Improve Cash Flow with the Click of a Button

In light of recent economic conditions, agencies have had to become more nimble and flexible than ever before. In order to react and adapt as client budgets shift and pipelines transition toward organic growth, it’s crucial that agencies get their core financial operations in tip top shape. The ability to forecast revenue, capacity, and cash flow in real-time is simply table stakes. However, accurate real-time operational data can’t exist unless your tech stack is fully integrated and sharing the same data throughout. Manual processes, data reentry, and spreadsheet imports must be eliminated to reach peak efficiency and provide the best decision-making data possible. To fully integrate your application ecosystem, you’ll need a true API integration between systems.

That’s why the power of the integration between Deltek WorkBook and FreeWheel's Strata can’t be overlooked.

API integration refers to the process of connecting different software applications or systems using an Application Programming Interface (API). API integration enables different applications to share data and functionality seamlessly, without the need for manual intervention. It is critical to your agency’s success, as it enables you to automate processes, improve data accuracy, and increase productivity. This seamless transfer of data can help you become more agile, responsive, and competitive in today's fast-paced digital environment.

For agencies that manage media planning and buying in house, the inefficiencies of reconciling financials so you can pay vendors while making sure the agency also gets paid can have an enormous impact on cash flow. It is absolutely critical that the data coming from media plans is fed into financial AR and AP processes and vice versa. Media is a big-ticket expense and usually paid for upfront, and if your scope of work only allows you to bill after the media runs, financial reconciliation is an anxiety-ridden timing game. Even more taxing is when the media and finance departments are reentering invoice information by hand or waiting hours for spreadsheets to import - resulting in data that can’t be trusted, because it’s already out of date. Considering the length of time between when you’ve purchased the media to when the agency gets paid, you might as well be charging interest fees because you’re acting like a bank for your client.

The only true way to get accurate, actionable financial data is to leverage an API integration between your media planning and buying system and your agency management solution. With the simple click of a button, insertion order (IO) or broadcast order (BO) data from Strata can be fed into Deltek WorkBook, which gets reflected in your Price Quote or Estimate and automatically raises a purchase order (PO) to secure the funds. After the media campaign has run, and reconciliation has been done in Strata, with another click of a button, that data is brought into WorkBook to reconcile spend and initiate payment. No data reentry, no lengthy import process, no problem. Just real-time results.

Case in point, when OH Partners was struggling with unnecessary duplication of work as it related to media billing, they were eager to reduce the time spent doing data entry and manual updates between Strata and their accounting system. After replacing their deficient agency management system with Deltek WorkBook and implementing the API integration with Strata, OH Partners was able to eliminate the need to manually enter media invoices into the financial module of the system. With the advantage of a true API integration between systems, the agency was able to increase the transparency of entire approved media plans in WorkBook as well as paid status back to Strata, all with the click of a button. Not only were they able to eliminate duplicate data entry time for estimates, PO’s, and vendor invoices for both media and accounting teams, but the thoroughness of the WorkBook integration allowed them to resolve prior ERP integration issues through custom logic to alleviate rounding issues as well as the ability to capture tax as needed.