As consumer preferences shift and the digital media environment continues to evolve, businesses in the advertising, media and publishing industries need robust technology tools that help them stay out in front of these trends.

Regardless of the client or job size, these companies have to be able to deliver on faster schedules while staying both agile and efficient. This, in turn, helps them overcome their biggest challenges while also leveraging new opportunities for growth.

Optimizing the project lifecycle in a complex and ever-changing environment isn’t easy, but NetSuite 2020 Release 2 enhances a platform that offers business process automation and the back-office support that companies need to run smarter, faster and better.

Optimizing the Project Lifecycle

  • The new release improves the project manager user experience, allowing those in this role to manage by exception and proactively address project issues in the advertising and media industry. The system “speaks” to the project manager about activities, project statuses and potential issues. Individual indicators are built into the system and, based on the indicator’s condition, there are also recommended actions provided that hints at how to resolve the issue.

  • Revenue budgets can now be calculated based on quantity and rates pulled in from rate cards, items and billing classes to get more accurate budgeting. The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) now allows users to save as a template to more easily create future WBS budgets for similar projects. This is a real time-saver for advertising, media and publishing entities that take on similar projects for multiple clients.
  • A prebuilt integration to Oracle Content and Experience (OCE) provides a fully-featured content platform directly accessible from NetSuite for robust document management and collaboration. Users can upload all project-related files directly on the project in NetSuite using the system-generated OCE folders. This allows users to search, collaborate and share project documents, images, video, code and other digital assets via a single, secure project file.

Continuous Employee Engagement

  • Expense report credit card integration lets users populate NetSuite expense module expense lines directly from American Express corporate credit card accounts streamlining the process, increasing user adoption and reducing data entry errors.

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  • Automated controls and notifications on expense reports ensure compliance on company policies and contracts. This results in fewer unapproved overages and limits excess expenses.
  • The new SuitePeople Performance Management module provides HR leaders a central place to easily administer the performance review process that not only enables greater performance management efficiencies, but also helps employees stay engaged with goal creation, monitoring, measuring and recognition for achievements. Employees and managers continuously stay aligned on top priorities to maximize performance. (Available in North America only)
  • Adopting a self-service model for managers not only reduces the burden on HR staff but also increases the efficiency of processing employee change requests. Managers now have three new templates for common change requests in SuitePeople: promotions, transfers and base pay changes. (Available in North America only.)

Financial and Operational Excellence

  • Invoice grouping lets you consolidate multiple invoices into a single invoice that’s delivered to the customer, and it also allows payments accepted at the group level to be applied to individual invoices. This reduces manual grouping, ensures accurate invoices and improves cash flows by decreasing days sales outstanding.
  • You can easily net intercompany receivables and payables with a new feature that enables accountants and controllers to offset mutual intercompany open balances and auto-generate intercompany netting settlements. The result is fewer open intercompany transactions and reduced manual effort to manage open balances.
  • Intercompany cross charge automation enables accounting teams to automatically post cross charge transactions between subsidiaries. This automation reduces the manual effort and accelerates the accounting period close process.

Intelligent Cash Management

  • With the Sequential Liability SuiteApp, media, advertising and publishing firms gain a unified AR, AP and cash in bank report that supports the monitoring and paying off of vendor liabilities after receiving payment from customers for related project transactions. This helps firms manage cash and maintain good vendor relationships, while also collaborating in real-time with project managers on AR and AP balances related to client work.
  • Bank reconciliations are streamlined with the added ability to automatically create and post transactions directly from imported bank data, thus greatly reducing the manual time to process and match your bank data to your books in NetSuite.

Learn More About NetSuite 2020 Release 2

These are just the highlights; there's much more for advertising, media, and publishing companies in NetSuite 2020 Release 2 than can be covered in a single blog post. For more specifics on the complete list of new features, be sure to read the Release Notes.

New to the release process? Learn more about it here.

Finally, be sure to request access to your Release Preview account. There, you can test to see how the new features will work with your own data and get a jumpstart on maximizing the impact of NetSuite 2020 Release 2.

The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products may change and remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.