We know how important tracking your budget is. For this reason, we are excited to be your financial partners. Our job is to make managing your financial commitment as easy as possible. We take our financial stewardship of your account seriously and believe in total transparency.
What you might be most interested in is:
- How we safeguard your investment
- How we monitor your budget
- How you will be invoiced
- How we will report on your investment
We look forward to working with you and your finance team. Should you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us. We are here to help.
How we Safeguard your Investment:
How we Safeguard your Investment:
We understand the significance of your investment, which is why we are committed to investing in industry-leading tools and technology such as MediaOcean, the recognized leader in media industry software, as well as Office 365 and SharePoint. It allows us to not only provide you with integrated customized reporting but also meet your specific process needs and audit requirements in a transparent and efficient manner. With this cloud technology, it is important to ensure our data is both secure and stable. To guarantee maximum uptime and security, we outsource our IT to Bulletproof, a leading cybersecurity firm with more than 17 years of expertise in protecting companies around the world. With their support, we ensure that your data is secure by:
- Training our employees on the latest cyber-attacks, phishing scams, and email hacks,
- Employing a fully managed next-generation firewall,
- Ensuring endpoint encryption, protection, and management on all devices,
- Running encrypted data back-ups several times a day, and
- Requiring multi-factor authentication on all devices.
In today’s environment, data security is a priority for our team. We focus on creating a culture of security backed by the infrastructure to handle the speed and demand of our clients’ growing businesses.
How we Monitor your Budget:
How we Monitor your Budget:
To ensure that every dollar is accounted for we separate your budget into the following categories:
- Time + Space Fees – This will include fees for strategy, planning, client management, and execution.
- Production Fees – These represent items like travel and 3rd party contractors. These fees would only be charged if agreed to in the initial contract discussion.
- Media – This includes all media being purchased on your behalf. We bill you for the media and, in turn pay the media vendors.
At the beginning of any campaign with us, we will first ask you to sign off on the agreed fees for your project by sending a Fee Estimate document. This ensures that we are all on the same page with respect to what you will be charged for the work that we will deliver. During the campaign, if the scope changes and our fees need to change, we will always send you a revised Fee Estimate to be signed prior to billing.
Before any media is purchased on your behalf, we will require a signed Media Authorization. This document will advise you of the channels and budget we will be spending. This is directly tied into our media buying system and ensures that we track authorized dollars to ordered media. If, during the campaign, media budgets are changed, we will send a revised authorization for your approval.
We believe in transparency and accountability when it comes to managing your investment.
How you will be Invoiced:
How you will be Invoiced:
Each month you will receive invoices from us for fees and media. These are always billed separately and will correlate to the Fee Estimate and Media Authorization you have approved at the beginning of the campaign.
Fees are billed on your agreed schedule which is set prior to signing the Fee Estimate.
Media is pre-billed 30 days in advance of its scheduled run date
We know that although robust, our system can generate invoices that are hard to read. To help you decipher we have provided sample invoices.
How we will report on your Investment:
How we will report on your Investment:
We recognize that each client will have different requirements when it comes to financial tracking. We endeavour to work with you to ensure our reporting integrates into your internal needs.
Our standard framework will include the Budget Control Report (BCR). This report records all media in the month that it is set to run. It is updated monthly to reflect variances from planned and actual media. Each month any unspent planned budget will be reinvested into future months. You receive a credit on your invoice for the variance and are rebilled when the budget is reinvested in future months. This system ensures every dollar is always accounted for.
Each month you will also receive a Statement of Account to recap all billing and ensure you have received all invoices.
When reconciling the BCR to your invoices please note that all media is recorded on the BCR in the month it occurs while invoices are capturing pre-billed media and reconciliation billings. This can mean that in your own internal system multiple months of media are entered by invoice date not by the date the media has occurred.
Our role is to make it easier to handle any reporting requirements you have so please reach out to us if you require a more custom approach.
