 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| |
Industry: Media, Publishing &
Broadcasting
Annual Rev: $1.4B
Employees: 3,200
MDP (Nasdaq Traded) |
| |
Meredith Corporation is a media and marketing
company, engages in magazine and book
publishing, television broadcasting, integrated
marketing, and interactive media business. It
operates in two segments, Publishing and
Broadcasting. |
| |
| http://www.meredith.com |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
| Meredith Corp. |
| revstreamTM solution to streamline Revenue & Billing for Online Publishing |
| |
 |
revstreamTMsolution was a great fit for Meredith onsidering the complexity and reconciliation involved in revenue recognition and billing. In addition we were looking for a flexible and extensible solution which can easily adopt changes to the pricing, revenue recognition and reconciliation rules driven by the evolving online business model. Aquarius team did a stellar job in implementing revstreamTM on-time and with in budget while fully transitioning the knowledge to our IT team to support the solution post go-live
Tina Steil, Vice President &CTO |
 |
|
| |
| |
| Overview |
| |
| Meredith’s online publishing business has been growing rapidly over the years
driven by the shift in publishing from magazine to online. Meredith uses
Google’s DART (DFP) platform to manage online advertising and delivery.
Their revenue recognition & billing processes were manual and time consuming
(excel based) considering the complexity involved with calculations for
forecasting, delivery based rev rec, static and delivery based invoicing, 3rd
party stats based billing reconciliation, no integration between ad delivery &
revenue/billing systems and lack of line level details to support customer invoices. |
| |
| |
| Challenge |
| |
 compliance risks - excel based process for revenue recognition,billing & month-end reconciliation with manual controls
billing - inability to do dynamic billing for IO/lines and static billing
revenue recognition - estimate and adjustments instead of actual for a month; extensive manual work to tie revenue to invoicing
complex rules - complex and rapidly evolving revenue recognition rules due to emerging ad units and delivery/counting mechanisms
real-time IO management - managing IO changes in real-time
duplication of customer records - impacting credit and collections
3rd Party stats- inability to enter/reconcile 3rd party delivery data
reconciliation and month-end close process - changes to orders were frozen for 2-4 days during month-end due to complex revenue calculation and time consuming reconciliation processes across multiple systems and in excel
Reporting: time consuming due to multiple sources of data |
| |
| |
| Solution |
| |
aquarius was engaged to implement revstreamTM revenue and billing management solution to standardize and streamline revenue recognition and billing processes to support the rapidly growing and evolving online advertising business. revstreamTM solution provided a “single integrated revenue & billing platform” to enable the following
key capabilities:
Automated and flexible revenue recognition and billing engine
Fully automated billing process for the entire order life cycle
Revenue recognition based on actuals for the entire month
Integration w/ Google’s DART (DFP) system for near-realtime Order, Customer & Delivery data synchronization w/ revstreamTM
Month end close process is much shorter and doesn’t impact campaign mgmt (24x7)
Standardized APIs to enable easier integration of future acquisitions for revenue recognition and billing
Line level details along with the invoices to improve collections
Reporting data integration with Micro Strategy BI platform for transactional reports & business intelligence dashboards |
| |
| |
| Results |
| |
Compliance risks minimized and mitigated
Finance team’s productivity increased
Accuracy of revenue reporting improved
Campaign mgmt is uninterrupted (24x7)
Scalable platform to support future growth
Flexibility to configure emerging pricing & revenue models
Single source of truth for full financials (billing, revenue, GL)
Improved customer sat due to accurate, timely and detailed billing
Comprehensive reporting in Micro strategy for transactional,forecast and month-end reporting
Integration w/ Google’s DART (DFP) order & delivery system
Streamlined 3rd party delivery data reconciliation for final billing |
|
