FinancialForce.com Delivers New Application for Publishers to Dramatically Simplify the Business of Online Advertising

San Mateo, CA, July 06, 2011 --(PR.com)-- FinancialForce.com, the cloud applications company, today launched a new solution to enable media companies to integrate Salesforce CRM, ad servers and FinancialForce Billing in the cloud.

FinancialForce for Media automates the process of selling, tracking and billing for online advertising campaigns. The solution closes the loop between Salesforce CRM, ad servers like Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers and FinancialForce Billing, creating one integrated process. Now online publishers will gain unprecedented efficiency and complete account visibility through all stages of the online advertising sales, ad serving and billing cycle.

FinancialForce for Media helps publishers make the shift to online products including mobile platforms with optimal speed and operational performance. It is designed to work seamlessly with all Force.com applications and synchronize with other ad severs and ERP systems. By providing 360-degree account and agency views from a single cloud, publishers can analyze an account’s opportunities, insertion orders, impressions served, click rates, billing and receivables all from one easily accessible information source.

“Media companies typically rely on separate disconnected systems to support their opportunity-to-cash process,” said Jeremy Roche, CEO of FinancialForce.com. “This fragmented environment causes manual, labor-intensive processes which are prone to error. Data fragmentation also leads to billing reconciliation problems and makes unified account visibility elusive or impossible. As a result, publishers often face long billing cycles that contribute to delays in cash flow and long period close processes.”

U.S. News & World Report is one of the first customers to implement FinancialForce for Media to unify and replace multiple systems. By connecting Salesforce CRM, DoubleClick DART Sales Manager (DSM), DoubleClick DART for Publishers (DFP) and FinancialForce Accounting and Billing into a closed loop system, US News made dramatic efficiency gains and greatly improved account visibility.

“We were able to reduce our billing cycle by two weeks,” said Yingjie Shu, Vice President, Information Technology, US News & World Report. “We are far more efficient and have dramatically improved the billing reconciliation process. Our sales and management teams now have information from the entire opportunity to billing cycle at their fingertips on Force.com.”

“It has never been more critical for publishers to differentiate themselves in the competitive and ever changing media landscape. Cloud computing is allowing us to do that,” said US News’ Shu. “FinancialForce.com’s media solution is providing the data, process efficiencies and insight we need to optimize ad sales and deliver the best service to our clients. We picked the right company to support our business.”

“As publishers face the urgent need to adapt to a new media landscape, they have to escape the constraints, inefficiencies and endless development timelines of traditional disconnected enterprise systems,” said Renny Monaghan, Vice President, Industry Solutions at salesforce.com. “With an end-to-end system on the Force.com platform, media companies can overcome a historical barrier to increase ad sales and deliver customer service while keeping a lid on administrative costs. FinancialForce for Media is a prime example of the power of the new era of cloud computing.”

FinancialForce for Media unifies and automates process and data flows across traditionally fragmented media industry financial environments. An opportunity created in Salesforce CRM is linked to proposal creation in an ad server based on available ad units. This proposal is synced to FinancialForce Accounting for the creation of a media sales agreement and an insertion order; at the same time, the opportunity is updated in Salesforce CRM. Once the ad has been served, billing information is imported to FinancialForce Accounting to update the sales agreement on an as-needed basis. Users can automatically create invoices, easily reconcile with the original proposal and post updated account information to accounts receivable as required. FinancialForce for Media can integrate with a variety of ad servers such as Operative and ERP systems such as Peoplesoft, Oracle and SAP.

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