It's often said that "you can't rush creativity," but when producing creative is your business, patience isn't an option. In today's lighting-paced digital environment, advertising, media and publishing companies are under constant pressure to crank out engaging creative quickly and cost effectively while maintaining profitability, adhering to schedules and managing talent.

Whether that creative engages its audience via social media, digital video or a magazine, it's supported by an array of back office business processes: pitching new deals, growing talent, managing projects, overseeing insertion orders, running billing, controlling inventory and purchasing materials, all on a global scale. Generating creative rapidly with that level of complexity is no easy task, and NetSuite delivers a solution that grows with advertising, media and publishing firms, enabling them to streamline operations, grow subscribers and better track advertising performance with a unified system.

NetSuite 2019 Release 2 builds on that momentum, enabling creative firms to control their budgets and thus improve their margins, maximize their use of talent and thus enhance their scheduling and extract the business insight they need to grow. What's more, NetSuite's enhanced user experience is designed to delight project managers and accountants alike.

Manage Projects with Ease

Here's what some of the key enhancements in NetSuite 2019 Release 2 will bring to advertising, media and publishing (AMP) organizations:

  • Major enhancements to Advanced Project Budgets, a single-source project budget management tool, allow for budget versioning and planning. Activity Codes are associated with Project Tasks for revenue/cost performance visibility. Additionally, a Work Breakdown Structure can display costs and revenue within customizable time periods for profitability monitoring.
  • New Billing Rate Card functionality makes it easier for AMP companies to automate and administer complex billing arrangements anywhere in the billing process with suggested default billing based on the agreed client rates. The default billing rate can be applied on the client record, with an override capability on all rate card functions. Administrators and managers can also see client rate cards that have been created. The functionality also applies a Project Billing Rate that originates based on the parent project hierarchy.
  • A new Project Resource Utilization Target feature enables services business to define utilization goals for billable employees. Reporting insights enable better project staffing decisions.
  • Project managers frequently plan their projects based on a deadline, allowing them to schedule project phases from the end date backwards. That means they must determine when each task has to be completed in order to meet the final deadline, an arduous process even with the simplest of projects. NetSuite 2019 Release 2 introduces the Project Workback Schedule, which offers automatic calculation of project start dates based on scheduled end dates and hours required. Work Forward scheduling is available as well, with calculated project end dates determined based on start date, working days and hours scheduled.

Optimizing Your Financials Workflow

  • The tedium of bank reconciliations is alleviated in NetSuite 2019 Release 2 with the ability to import bank data of any supported file format, from any financial institution, directly into NetSuite. Enhancements enable the creation of custom bank statement parsers to read bank files in any format, as well as direct bank connections for automatic file upload via SFTP connection. What's more, the new Bank Statement Parser SuiteApp includes out-of-the-box parsers supporting the MT940, BAI2 and OFX file formats.
  • Advanced Revenue Management is more flexible than ever, thanks to the new rules-based recognition treatment. This allows customers to define different revenue recognition attributes and elements based on company-defined rules, such as accounting for the impact of credit memos.
  • Multi-Sub Customer/Vendor functionality makes it simple for advertising, media and publishing firms to manage global intercompany relationships with partners and vendors. Single customers and vendors can be assigned across multiple subsidiaries, reducing the manual effort of managing single subsidiary customers and vendors and ultimately reducing the number of customers and vendors by replacing them with multi-sub ones.
  • Vendor deposits can be easily added and applied against open vendor bills within NetSuite. Similarly, vendor deposits can be recorded, tracked and applied against a specific bill or different bills from the same vendor. Vendor Prepayment makes it possible to pay vendors before a purchase order is accepted, and it's now possible to create standalone vendor prepayments and apply them against related bills.

Learn More About NetSuite 2019 Release 2

There's much more for advertising, media and publishing companies in the updated NetSuite than can be covered in a single blog post. Be sure to check out the release notes for a full list of benefits that NetSuite's latest release can bring to your organization and the blog highlighting new functionality for all organizations.

Finally, for a hands-on primer, be sure to access your included preview account as soon as it's available. There, you'll be able to see how the new features will work with your own data and get a jumpstart on maximizing the impact of NetSuite 2019 Release 2.