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Media Billing

We are a full-service agency that invoices our major clients on a monthly basis. These monthly invoices include all of the professional services, direct costs and media buys. We have found that in order to invoice our clients this way, we must re-key a lot of the same information from the insertions orders on the client invoice. We could do a media invoice in C&P which will pull the information to the client invoice, but you can't add anything else to it, nor can you bill insertions orders with broadcast orders. How do other agencies handle billing their clients?

Thanks,

Belinda M. Wilson
Director of Finance/Operations
Fitting Group
www.fittingroup.com

We bill each job individually. This gives us very accurate records and allows us to easily credit any problems (i.e. - buys get messed up and you have to issue a credit) You could bill each individual job separately and attach a statement that shows the entire balance due.

Laura McWhorter
CFO McWhorter Design Inc.

Belinda,

We also bill out clients on a monthly basis, we bill per job. Most of our "media" jobs are set up separate then our creative jobs, however we do have other costs from time to time besides ad space that we need to bill. Because the "media billing" function does not allow you to add other task codes and bill for other expenses (internal or external) we rarely use this function.

We usually use the progress/finall billing function and manually type in the information. However this of course leaves room for human error, and our invoices are double checked by more then one person before final copies are mailed out to the clients.

I have spoken to Cc&P tech support many times on an easier way to create media invoices and include other detail, C&P does not have much advise at this time and they say it is an item on their wish list.

Good luck to you!

Theresa B. Clemons
Business Manager
Publicom Incorporated

We, too, bill our clients on a monthly basis. Our media buys are a separate job from the creative and therefore I do use the media invoice feature so the client can see which insertion order they are being charged for. I invoice our clients for these charges as soon as I receive the vendor invoice and not wait for the regular billing cycle.

Diane Elliott
Bookkeeper
Deardorff Associates, Inc.

The reason we can't create media and production billings on the same invoice is primarily due to their formatting differences. On a media billing the column headings are for pertinent order information your clients want to see and the subtotals are by station or publication. Where on a production billing the column headings are for task descriptions, hours, estimates, and previous billings, and the subtotals are by task group. Because these two formatting types are so different, we are not able to create a "combination" invoice type. We are aware our users want this, but we are limited by the capabilities of the program in generating reports. As well, additional complications are caused by the fact that media invoices bill orders, not just task amounts, as production billings do. Functions like adding new amounts to an existing invoices becomes a complicated matter. Creating separate invoices, one for billing media orders and one for production, solves both of these problems, and often your clients grow to prefer this.

Kent Richardson
Clients and Profits