PM360 CLIR Financials Brings Long-Needed Automation to Agency Invoice Management

Newest PM360 CLIR application resolves invoice headers, until now one of TV agencies' most persistent sources of wasted person-hours and spent resources

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PremiumMedia360

Jun 28, 2021, 18:30 ET

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., June 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today PM360 introduced CLIR Financials, its invoice automation software that provides a new way forward for TV media financial operations. CLIR Financials is specifically designed to resolve invoice header problems—one of the most persistent source of challenges that media finance and buying groups have faced for years.

When stations bill agencies for completed campaigns, agency buying and finance teams must approve or challenge every invoice they receive. This requires analyzing each invoice detail — starting with the most basic information like the brand and product being advertised, and the specific campaign the invoice applies to. These and similar basic data are typically captured in the invoice's first field: the invoice header.

Due to inevitable human error, agencies often receive invoice headers with inaccurate or missing information. It's left to the agencies – which have more background in-house on each invoice than sellers do – to find the accurate information and correct the header problems. In practice, this means agency teams must constantly sort through and cross-reference countless station files to find the right data and complete each header. The process is bogged down further by the challenges of shuttling these details between teams and departments—and wastes agency media and finance groups myriad hours each year.

Until now, truly efficient solutions to the problem have not emerged. While EDI has automated away similar invoice problems in the past, EDI is built around shared standards—and header information has never been included in TV industry invoicing standard guidelines. Instead, agencies need to bring in high-priced invoice processing companies to help manage the ensuing workload.

Today, PM360's CLIR Financials provides the long-overdue automation needed to solve these invoicing issues. To do this, CLIR Financials builds on another PM360 CLIR product already in use across agencies: CLIR Flight, which agencies use to manage airings data – the same information they cross-reference against wrong or empty invoice headers. CLIR Financials scans agencies' airing logs recorded in CLIR Flight, pinpoints the correct information, and ports that data into the invoices themselves. As a result, agencies can immediately have the complete, accurate header information they require—even if they receive inaccurate or incomplete invoice headers from station partners.

Meanwhile, because PM360 CLIR products are compatible with all leading industry data transmission formats, agencies can use CLIR Financials to port station invoices into agency media management systems directly. This frees agency teams from the extensive busywork they normally face inputting the invoices they receive in-system.

These invoicing benefits are in addition to those CLIR Flight already provides. CLIR Flight identifies and alerts buyers and sellers to inflight campaign discrepancies, and equips them with auditable chat tools they use to amend what needs to be fixed, well before the corresponding invoices are issued. This helps drive the number of discrepant invoices way down—often to zero.

Larry Shiels, SVP, Buy-Side Solutions, PM360, explained why CLIR Financials is a solution whose time has come. "Handling invoices is amongst the most fundamental tasks involved in running a business—and yet for too long, it's been a tangle of complication for media agencies buying TV," Shiels observed. "CLIR Financials simplifies the process dramatically—bringing efficiency to media invoice payments, and helping agencies recoup the wasted time and resources they've lost to header errors, incomplete or incorrect data all these years."

About PremiumMedia360

PremiumMedia360 helps media agencies and sellers buy, sell, and partner more effectively—by letting them take control of the data that guides their interactions. Its reporting and collaboration tools dramatically reduce the time and resources it takes to understand 6where campaigns stand—from order to invoice—and readies media companies to conduct business across new formats and standards such as TIP. The result: airings records stop being bottlenecks, and start being the source of business insight they should be. Learn more at www.PremiumMedia360.com.

Contact:
Abe Mezrich
[email protected]

SOURCE PremiumMedia360