New Feature: Ad-hoc invoice frequency

Release date: February 22, 2023

A key benefit of a media planning software is to validate the invoices you receive from media vendors and track their payments.

MediaPlanHQ provides all the tools to perform this task efficiently.

When planning a media insertion, you can specify the invoice frequency (One time, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, or Annually) to match how you expect to be invoiced by the media vendor.  The system then generates the expected invoices which you can process in your validation/payment workflow when you received them.

But, MediaPlanHQ assumed that the frequency of expected invoice(s) would follow a standard timeline.  For example, a monthly invoice covers the 1st and last day of the month. 

What if you receive an invoice every time you reach a spending threshold - your invoice frequency would then be random and cannot be known in advance.  

With this release, MediaPlanHQ now provides support for ad-hoc multiple invoices. This allows creating ad-hoc invoices as you receive them.

Let's have a look at how it works...

Ad-hoc invoice frequency

Let's assume you plan an annual ad spend of $12,000 that runs from Jan 1st to Dec 31st with invoices based on a spending threshold of $1,000.

This means you'll receive an invoice every time you've spent $1,000.

Since you do not know the invoice periods in advance, you'd specify the "Ad-Hoc" invoice frequency for the media insertion:

At first, the system will create a single expected invoice covering the entire period of your media insertion:

Receiving an ad-hoc invoice

Let's assume you've reached the $1,000 threshold on Jan 22.  You'll receive an invoice for the period of Jan 1st to Jan 22. 

To create the invoice, you'd use the split invoice to create the expected invoice at the appropriate period:

This will display a window where you'd define the direction of the new invoice (#1) and the date to split the invoice (#2).

The split operation will adjust the period of the existing invoice and create a new invoice to fill the period gap.  Thus, in our example, it will create a preceding invoice with period Jan 1 - Jan 22 (#1), and move the current invoice period to Jan 23 - Dec 31 (#2):

You can now process the invoice for the period of January 1st to January 22nd through your invoice approval/payment workflow:

As you receive invoices, you continue to split the last invoice to create new expected invoices with the exact ad-hoc periods:

Merging invoices

You can also merge invoices together.  This can be handy if you've mistakenly split an invoice to the wrong period - you can merge it back together.

This will display a window to select the merge direction (#1) - merge with the preceding or following invoice.  

The merge operation will adjust the period dates of the selected invoice to include the existing invoice period and delete the latter.  This means that the selected invoice, the one you clicked the merge button, will be deleted and all its information will be lost.

Note that you can only split or merge invoices that are in the "expected" workflow stage.  In most accounts, this is the "Waiting" invoice status, but may be different depending on your configuration in the Administration > Invoice statuses.

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That's it ! We hope you'll enjoy the new ad-hoc invoice frequency. 

Give it a try and let us know what you think !

As always, don't hesitate to send us your great feedback or other ideas for new features !

Have a great day,

The MediaPlanHQ team