Global Ad tech Company Gears Up for Growth with NetSuite
Working with Mash Technology Group, Yieldmo implements NetSuite to bring its accounting functions onto a single platform, distribute decision making throughout the organization and manage its global tax requirements.
With companies worldwide expected to spend over $700 billion a year on digital advertising by 2025—up from a current $566 billion—many are using analytics and real-time data intelligence to make quick, dynamic decisions about their ad spend. Advertising technology (“ad tech”) company Yieldmo operates a smart exchange that both buyers and sellers use to increase the value of inventory. Yieldmo does this by:
- Maximizing outcomes on a fraud-free, global smart exchange
- Capturing and interpreting unique, privacy-compliant, predictive signals that increase engagement
- Curating inventory in real-time through machine learning and optimization
Founded in 2012, this 160-employee adtech firm has evolved along with the digital advertising world, while also maintaining a focus on providing quality advertising.
Gearing Up for Growth
Operating in a sector that’s matured and expanded over the last decade, Yieldmo has been in growth mode for the last three years. It had been using QuickBooks to manage its accounting and invoicing activities until CFO Rick Eaton wanted to move away from the “centralized command” approach and over to a distributed decision-making model. This would find fewer financial decisions being funneled to the CFO, and an entire organization playing a part in such decisions.
“Our CFO was approving every journal entry and every wire that went out the door,” said
Jon Toland, CIO. As the company grew, its accounting team faced its own challenges with QuickBooks, which was being used for general ledger (GL) and accounts receivable (AR) activities, but not for collections or accounts payable (AP). This piecemeal approach required extra time, spreadsheets and manual processes that Yieldmo wanted to minimize.
Interested in working only with best-in-class software providers, Yieldmo went in search of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that would help it address its challenges and also accommodate future growth. “We did an extensive search when we had started the process with all the well-known players out there,” said Toland. “We went through that evaluation process of what was available to us, and we also considered potentially building our own solution from scratch.”
NetSuite rose to the top for its native functionalities and how easily the ERP integrates with external software applications. The selection team also liked the short speed of implementation and how, once in place, NetSuite would give Yieldmo the tools to stand up to any outside audit and potentially even go public at some point. “The extensibility that NetSuite offers was key to our ERP selection process,” said Toland.
Silky Smooth from Day One
Having worked with Mash Technology Group on past software implementations, Toland invited the company to participate in the request for proposal (RFP) process as soon he learned that Mash was a NetSuite partner. Yieldmo was matched with an information lead who had experience with the ERP and who was well-versed in the adtech space.
“She was able to speak the language that even I wasn’t really all that fluent in with our technology teams,” Toland recalled. “She also understood the key metrics and drivers of their businesses; that made that communication silky-smooth from day one.” Yieldmo worked with Mash for its NetSuite implementation, relies on it for support services, and expects to soon be working with the company to roll out the second phase of its ERP deployment.
Toland said the Mash team’s strength also lies in its willingness to listen to Yieldmo’s challenges and then make good technical and functional recommendations to solve those problems. Coming out of an environment where general ledger and AR/AP activities were handled by separate systems, for example, the company needed help eliminating this piecemeal approach and simplifying it on a single platform.
“Mash informed us that managing GL without an AR and AP component was going to hamstring us,” said Toland. “Having that expertise from both the functional accounting aspect and the technical perspective was valuable, particularly in terms of how well the NetSuite modules interact with one another.”
With its new ERP, Yieldmo also wanted to be able to institute financial approach limits and thresholds for various team members. Not available in QuickBooks, this is a native capability in NetSuite, which offers a role-based access control system. Toland said the company began realizing the benefit of this functionality on the night that the new ERP was switched on.
“The wires that left the organization that night were initiated and approved through NetSuite and were sent directly to our bank through the portal,” he explained. “That was a very tangible, day one benefit.”
Expanding its Footprint with NetSuite
Live on NetSuite since July 1, 2022, Yieldmo has implemented GL, AR and AP. It’s adding procurement to that lineup and working to push more ERP functionality out further into the organization. All of its billing activity is also running through NetSuite, which today provides all of the growing ad tech firm’s core accounting functionality.
Working with Mash, the company is planning out phase two of its NetSuite implementation. During this period, Toland hopes to distribute more of the ERP’s secondary or tertiary modules into the accounting organization and also continue pushing the capabilities out to the rest of the company. “I’m fairly confident that as we grow,” said Toland, “our next step will be deploying NetSuite’s procurement module across the entire organization.”
Because it now employs a globally-distributed workforce, Yieldmo must also manage international tax requirements in Europe and Asia-Pacific. “We have to stay on top of the regulatory impact of who we owe tax dollars to,” said Toland, “including whether we have to collect taxes and how much we owe.”
With NetSuite in place, Yieldmo will have that visibility across all of its lines of business. These insights will give its CFO and other decision-makers confidence that the decisions that they’re making are compliant. “When it’s time for the annual audit, the speed at which we can deliver the discovery to an external firm will increase tremendously,” said Toland. “This is yet another potential benefit we’ll receive as we continue to expand our footprint with NetSuite.”
