The Challenge:
Bliss Point Media (BPM) is a cutting-edge video advertising agency. Since its founding in 2014, the company has become a leading purchaser of streaming media. With over $850 million in media under management, they establish, optimize, and scale TV and streaming video campaigns for direct-to-consumer companies.
In the past five years, the organization has experienced hyper-growth, expanding 20x in size. As BPM’s operations scaled, naturally, the number of bills the finance team was responsible for also increased. The team went from receiving a few hundred invoices monthly to managing thousands.
With thousands of invoices, hundreds of line items per invoice, and little standardization between documents, the finance team needed to act fast to keep pace with business growth. Matt Cohen, VP of Finance, knew being proactive at this stage was critical for future success.
“It was a natural progression to decrease the time spent on processing bills and increase the accuracy and turnaround time of these processes. We need to ensure that we have the resources to support the rest of our organization as it grows and guarantees vendors are paid on time”, says Cohen.
To improve their payables process, the team wanted to:
- Streamline invoice reconciliation
- Reduce manual work to free up time for technical projects
- Shorten timelines for dispute resolution
- Create a single source of truth and standardization across invoices
Freeing the Finance Team
Manual processes limited the team’s capacity to work on more needle-moving activities. However, Matt knew that with the right technology, AP-related tasks could be offloaded, saving his team substantial time to reallocate elsewhere.
Matt says, “This was a really important part of selling the implementation. We did the math, and if we let automation take over at a steady state, we’re looking at saving seven to eight hundred hours a month. That is a lot of resources and a lot of capacity freed up to focus on our next problem.”
Enabling Scalability and Managing Hypergrowth
Shortening the period from invoice reconciliation to approval ensures that vendors are paid on time, but precision can’t be sacrificed in the process. Speed and accuracy are both critical. BPM needed strong internal controls to prevent common AP errors.
“The ability to scale our operations while avoiding additional opportunities for error is what this comes down to and what matters most…If we’re not thinking 6 to 12 months ahead, we’re way behind. If we address problems as they arise, it causes immense friction with customers, vendors, and employees.”
The Solution:
In the media and entertainment industry, the structure of invoices can vary from vendor to vendor. As a result, matching invoices against supporting documentation is difficult and time-consuming.
Considering BPM’s industry-specific complexity, it was clear to Matt and his team: they needed a flexible AP automation solution.
After listening to BPM’s concerns and goals, the OpenEnvoy team paired a customer-first mentality with artificial intelligence and was able to support their unique audit logic and use case.
OpenEnvoy is a scalable solution that we are going to keep with us no matter what accounting system is used in the future. It has freed up time and resources to focus on integration as well.
Matt Cohen, VP of Finance
Empowered by Automation
The BPM team has said goodbye to hours of data entry and manual reconciliation. Now OpenEnvoy programmatically digitizes their invoices, applies corresponding credit memos, then matches charges to ordered spend and accruals, all before an invoice reaches the ok-to-pay status.
When there is an overbilling, there is a quick investigation and the team can use documentation provided by OpenEnvoy to support disputes with their vendors.
OpenEnvoy has greatly reduced the number of hours we spent on entering and reconciling bills. It has removed the manual data entry portion, and we can now reconcile invoices faster and more accurately.
Accounting Manager, Quinn S
In addition to cost savings, the BPM team uses free time to do more high-impact activities, for example, performing more frequent check runs and creating stronger vendor relationships.
The Results:
OpenEnvoy has automated BPM’s manual AP processes and delivered next-level value through significant time and cost savings.
In 6 months, the Bliss Point team captured wins with:
- Automated workflows, satisfied vendors – 88% of invoices processed require no manual intervention. Now, the team uses their time savings to work on critical tasks like closing their books and performing more frequent check runs, which has strengthened vendor trust.
- Full forensic-level invoice auditing- OpenEnvoy identified $925K in disputable overbillings in real-time, enabling the team to prevent $206k in excess AP and capture $640k in more accurate AR.
- Accuracy before payment- Monthly BPM can receive up to 4,000 invoices, with hundreds of line items per invoice; OpenEnvoy processes invoices at the line-item level with industry-leading end-to-end accuracy of 99%.
- Improved customer experience- To maximize ROI for their customers, BPM ensures networks air every ad correctly. When an ad doesn’t run as ordered, BPM generates a credit. OpenEnvoy’s automation accurately applies these credit memos against invoices, preventing $500k in wasted spend for Bliss Point customers.
