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Industry: Interactive Entertainment Software
Annual Rev: $4.54b (public)
Employees: 7000
ATVI (Nasdaq traded) |
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| Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Activision Blizzard, Inc. is a worldwide pure-play online and console game publisher with leading market positions across all categories of the rapidly growing interactive entertainment software industry. |
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| http://www.activision.com |
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| Activision-Blizzard Inc. |
| Automating Entertainment Software and Services Revenue |
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revstreamTM has been by far the best tool we ever used for revenue deferral and recognition. It has enabled us to close the year within a record 10 days – fastest close in 10 years! 99.7% of the worldwide revenue and cogs are handled via revstreamTM
Director, WW Revenue
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revstreamTM is an excellent solution for both EITF 08-1 as it performs carveouts or reclasses between elements within a multiple element arrangement based on the selling price of the child elements. revstreamTM can treat revenue deferrals differently for each element and perform revenue deferral and recognition accounting entries for each element separately
Director, WW Revenue |
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| Overview |
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| Activision-Blizzard was formed by combining Activision and Vivendi Games in 2008 to become the world largest and most profitable online subscriptions and console video game company. With the growth of online game play functionality and features, there has been consideration that multiple elements were being delivered which would require the deferral approach to revenue recognition over the service period of the delivery. Managing such changes in excel worksheets for such a large volume of product lines across several different countries was becoming very time consuming and leading to inaccuracy in financial reporting. Many a time’s several entries that were booked on a monthly basis were not complete and there were huge adjustments and the end of the quarter. To address this pain point, Activision determined they needed a scalable and flexible solution as part of their Oracle ERP architecture. Aquarius, revstreamTM product was chosen as the preferred platform for world wide revenue recognition and reporting. |
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| Challenge |
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 Month end revenue close process took too long – complete revenue recognition to reconciliation process took about 10 people for 10+ days
Extremely manual process using excel worksheets - with over 60 different excel files; performing thousands of mass allocations in several batches and the recreating every month
Maintaining internal controls and clean audit trails
Support for growth – each time a new product or geo is added, the excel revenue recognition template required updates. This was time consuming and extremely prone to errors |
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| Solution |
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aquarius was engaged for this effort for their expertise in Entertainment and media software industry and domain expertise in revenue recognition and oracle financials experience. aquarius, “revstreamTM” revenue automation engine was configured and implemented world-wide in in less than 20 weeks to provide a single system on the oracle platform to automatically manage activision’s complete revenue accounting lifecycle.
key capabilities:
Comprehensive revenue and expense element load process that will identify, analyze, and perform event based revenue recognition calculations.
Full Revenue AutoAccounting functionality to support accounting distributions for Initiation, Reclassification, Deferral, and Recognition processes.
Process oriented revenue recognition workbench for reviewing, approving, and adjusting revenue transactions.
Automatic and manual application and maintenance of revenue holds.
Configurable Revenue Recognition Rules Mapping
Integration with Oracle General Ledger for creating revenue journal entries
Multi-org and multi-currency architecture to provide scalability and flexibility to grow and meet dynamic ongoing business requirements for new business units and products |
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| Results |
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Fastest close in 10 years. Revenue month end close in just 4 days (originally 15days)
Deferring revenue for more titles than ever and closing faster than ever.
Only 6 people throughout worldwide Activision Blizzard work on Revenue Deferral and Amortization.
99.7% of worldwide deferred revenue and COGS are handled via revstreamTM. .
Over $1.4 Billion in revenue has been deferred through revstreamTM.
revstreamTM has amortized $837 Million revenue and COGS thus far.
Single, integrated and standardized global revenue platform to provide accurate and timely daily revenue reporting and forecasting
Compliance risks minimized and mitigated with the use of approvals, exception reporting, audit trails and SOD |
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