What Business Visibility in Agencies Looks Like Before and After NetSuite

Although they are “behind the scenes,” ERP systems like NetSuite deliver profound operational benefits to Ad and Marketing Agencies like yours.

However, at the end of the day, most agency owners are going to be looking at the bottom line and what the system can do for financial management as well as operational information management.

Some of the key benefits from and operational and financial standpoint that you can realize with a transition to NetSuite are the following:

Manual Work versus Automation

Many agencies start off with manual processes that have developed over time as a consolidation of disparate activities. “Manage by Spreadsheet Report,” is the common situation as various areas of a business end up providing weekly spreadsheets of status, and management has to cobble them together to make sense of the big picture. It’s inefficient and time-consuming.

With NetSuite, one of the most immediate benefits realized was an automated and fast way to retrieve critical management reports on status, integrated activities, and accounting. The time saved was refocused on revenue-generating activities versus administration.

Lack of Accounting Integration

Accounting is often seen as the backroom requirement of a business, but it represents the financial lifeblood and circulatory system of the company. Without known what’s going on with expenses and accounts payable versus revenue and net profit, a company goes bankrupt pretty quick. Yet, ironically, many agencies try to function without serious integration of activities with accounting. Mistakes get made and businesses fail as a result.

NetSuite provided agencies who implemented the system the ability to exponentially grow and handle far more accounting integrated with activities without having to expand their Accounting office staff at all. The Accounting shops were able to function faster and with far more accurate data as well as produce automated reports with more meaningful information on finances.

Manual Management of Accounts Receivable

It’s a customer fringe benefit to extend credit on a sale for an eventual payment collection. Many businesses do the same. However, at some point the payment needs to be collected and timely to keep a business afloat. Manual collection of A/Rs is a poor way to stay on top of monies owed.

Accuracy is critical when it comes to A/Rs and NetSuite implementers found that both their recovery of monies owed went up and their disputes went down, but positive trends in improving financial collections on outstanding sales revenue. Additionally, invoicing via mailing was speeded up as well, improving the time taken for bills to get paid and A/Rs to be collected faster from customers.

Time Lost to Data Collection

Again, pre-NetSuite agencies complained of significant time lost gathering management data manually, cleaning and reconciling it, and then applying it in a meaningful manner.

With NetSuite, agencies have one system to pull data from versus many. Instead, they get a consolidated reporting tool that has greater accuracy, efficiency and usefulness in reporting values. And, because the companies’ communication systems and customer accounts were integrated, they can act on the information faster with customers as well.

The results, are multiple from bona fide NetSuite users:

• Improved accounting staff productivity by 40%-60%,
• Reduced collection time for A/Rs by 40%-50%, and
• Reduced days of sales outstanding  (DSO) by 20%-35%.

All of this begs the question: how long can your agency afford not to consider getting on board with NetSuite?