Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

There are some people who use Excel to manage everything but that's probably because that's all they know. When all you have is a hammer the whole world becomes a nail.

If you are talking about packaged software I can't imagine having one application that covers all of this. For example, accounting and media buying are very different disciplines. If you are only speaking about the transaction involved in media buying that's different. But, in my experience, the complexities of doing an integration between two products usually make it not worth doing. Why make it any harder than you have to?

You list some of the reasons you want an all in one package. You might want to try to further define the real issues and then group the pain points by commonality e.g. all related to double entry of transactions, rate the level of pain associated, the level of importance to your business, etc and then try to tackle the worst issues. Given the description of your company, you may find that your accounting issues are not the most mission critical if you have challenges managing customer projects.

Just some thoughts based on my interpretation of your question and my past experiences. Hope they provide some food for thought.

All the best!

Melissa

Hello,
We just started using Google Docs, and from what I'm seeing so far, it is an EXCELLENT (also SECURE and free!!) tool to organize word, excel, pdf's, powerpoint docuements and emails into one central, online location. You can setup permissions for users to be able to have different access levels to different documents, share between yourselves, even share with clients if you want. And anyone can access from any location, so you don't need to host it on your network.

We are a small agency of approx. the same size, and this has been a huge help for us.

Good luck!
Melissa

Hello

There is some software out there that does a lot of what you are asking for, as it's advertising agency specialized, but it's expensive. It's called Strata and it will use Nielsen and Arbitron data to help you with media buying (as well as giving you every possible way to look at your media buys and present them to the client), easily write media orders, easily reconcile invoices and then create media buying invoices to give to the client that show all of the media in a summary.

It doesn't do project management or CRM or track receivables, but it is definitely the best advertising agency software that you'll find right now and will make your life much easier if you plan and buy media. Although it won't help you with your accounting in terms of tracking receivables, what it will do is give you an easy way to create an invoice that you can just give an invoice number to that you can enter into your regular accounting system without having to generate a new one.

You can request a demo from Strata and get all of the information you're looking for. As I said, it's expensive, but if you're buying enough media it will pay for itself simply in the removal of headaches.

A word of caution about Google Docs - read the TOS - it says that anything that is stored in there can be used at any time for any purpose that Google feels like. Not sure you want your agency accounting in there.

If Strata turns out to be too expensive for you - consider using our agency (or any other agency) to do some of these tasks for you. We do invoice reconciliation and all kinds of media buying and planning and can help you with any part of it that you need help with and make it white label so that your clients will never know that you used an outside service.

Good luck - at the very least talk to Strata and do a demo - they will send you a book that has all of their reports in it, which will give you great ideas on how to look at information if you've never seen Strata.