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| Yahoo! |
| Streamline Billing and revenue Management for Online Display |
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Aquarius brings practical experience of understanding and interpreting Sox-Compliance requirements when implementing global financial systems related initiatives. They incorporated my team and SOX internal control requirements as an integral part of their project approach, solution design and systems implementation plan – not as an afterthought! This expertise and approach is what has been critical to our success.
Sonja Durnin, Director of Global Finance Compliance |
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| Overview |
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| Yahoo’s online display advertising has been growing steadily over the years
and the current homegrown systems to manage media revenue of $2+b were
not scalable and efficient. Revenue recognition & billing issues include: complexity of the calculation due to an estimation & adjustment process,
forecasting due to early month-end close, partner revenue share, invoicing
(static billing & delivery based billing), independently recognized revenue, 3rd
party stats based revenue/billing and lack of line level details to support
customer invoices. |
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| Challenge |
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 compliance risks - homegrown and semi-automated legacy system to
process revenue recognition, billing & month-end reconciliation
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 business models (ad exchange, etc.)
real-time IO management - managing IO changes in real-time
duplication of customer records - impacting credit and collections
M&A integration - acquisition integration to existing legacy platform
reconciliation and month-end close process - systems were locked
2-4 days during month-end as a result of complex revenue calculation
and time consuming reconciliation processes across multiple systems
Reporting: time consuming due to multiple sources of revenue data |
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| Solution |
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aquarius was engaged to standardize and streamline revenue recognition
and billing processes on a scalable platform (Oracle) to support the rapidly
growing and evolving display advertising business (~$2Bil in 2008).
Deployed solution provided a “single integrated revenue management
platform” to enable the following
key capabilities:
Automated and flexible revenue recognition and billing engine (built
as extensions to Oracle)
Revenue recognition is based on actuals for the entire month
Single global customer master with consolidated credit and global
aging/collections visibility
Month end close process is much shorter and doesn’t impact
campaign mgmt (24x7 globally)
Standardized APIs to enable easier integration of future
acquisitions for revenue recognition and billing
Line level details along with the invoices to improve collections |
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| Results |
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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 enable next-gen business models
Single source of truth for full financials (billing, revenue, credits,
collections, GL) - Oracle
Improved customer satisfaction due to accurate, timely and detailed
billing |
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