PM360’s CLIR Financials Brings Automation To Agency Invoice Management

Today, PremiumMedia360 introduced CLIR Financials, its invoice automation software for TV media financial operations. CLIR Financials is specifically designed to resolve invoice header problems, which PM360 calls “one of the most persistent source of challenges that media finance and buying groups have faced for years.”

When stations bill agencies for completed campaigns, agency buying and finance teams must approve or challenge every invoice they receive. This requires analyzing each invoice detail — starting with the most basic information like the brand and product being advertised, and the specific campaign the invoice applies to. These and similar basic data are typically captured in the invoice’s first field: the invoice header.

Due to inevitable human error, agencies often receive invoice headers with inaccurate or missing information. It’s left to the agencies — which have more background in-house on each invoice than sellers do — to find the accurate information and correct the header problems. In practice, this means agency teams must constantly sort through and cross-reference countless station files to find the right data and complete each header. The process, PM360 says, is bogged down further by the challenges of shuttling these details between teams and departments — and wastes agency media and finance groups myriad hours each year.

Until now, it says, truly efficient solutions to the problem have not emerged. Today, PM360’s CLIR Financials provides the automation needed to solve these invoicing issues. To do this, CLIR Financials builds on another PM360 CLIR product already in use across agencies: CLIR Flight, which agencies use to manage airings data — the same information they cross-reference against wrong or empty invoice headers. CLIR Financials scans agencies’ airing logs recorded in CLIR Flight, pinpoints the correct information, and ports that data into the invoices themselves. As a result, the company says, agencies can immediately have the complete, accurate header information they require—even if they receive inaccurate or incomplete invoice headers from station partners.

Meanwhile, because PM360 CLIR products are compatible with all leading industry data transmission formats, agencies can use CLIR Financials to port station invoices into agency media management systems directly. This frees agency teams from the extensive busywork they normally face inputting the invoices they receive in-system.

These invoicing benefits are in addition to those CLIR Flight already provides, the company says. “CLIR Flight identifies and alerts buyers and sellers to inflight campaign discrepancies, and equips them with auditable chat tools they use to amend what needs to be fixed, well before the corresponding invoices are issued. This helps drive the number of discrepant invoices way down — often to zero.”

Larry Shiels, SVP, buy-side solutions, PM360, said: “Handling invoices is amongst the most fundamental tasks involved in running a business—and yet for too long, it’s been a tangle of complication for media agencies buying TV. CLIR Financials simplifies the process dramatically — bringing efficiency to media invoice payments, and helping agencies recoup the wasted time and resources they’ve lost to header errors, incomplete or incorrect data all these years.”