Order Management
Getting an order approved can be a real nightmare. Countless hours are wasted designing proposals that require third party applications and sometimes printing physical copies to read. Ad Orbit simplifies all of that through intuitive order tools. Your sales rep can quickly create orders that conform to your rate cards or other service items, using templates that you design ensuring branding conformity. Clients can then approve orders online with digital signatures, saving yours and your client’s time. Ad Orbit integrates everything into one smooth process that allows for orders to be approved, paid, and executed within one system.
Order Management Features
Customize your rate cards for print & digital ads
Create service line items
Manage your ad inventory for print and digital ads
Get client approval easily with digital signatures
Invoice and process payments online
Send work requests via integrated ticketing system
Customize order and email templates intuitively
Generate interactive client proposals with adjustable line items
The Orders module can function differently for each customer based on system configurations. Here are all the configurations you may want to review before using the system. All of our help documents will give you an overview of how the system works, but you may need to consult support for specific workflow issues based on your configurations and can use our guided walkthroughs for step-by-step direction.
Require your users to always specify a billing contact when entering an order. Otherwise, the field will be blank and default to the company's billing contact.
Require your users to always specify an artwork contact when entering an order. Otherwise, the field will be blank and default to the company's print or digital artwork contact.
When enabled, a user is required to add an opportunity to a new order if they have an active opportunity for the company. The field won't be required if the sales rep doesn't have an active company.
The goal of the configuration is to make sure users are attaching opportunities to their orders and not leaving them in the pipeline.
Require a user to enter an ad note when submitting a line item with barter. Anytime a user enters a value in the barter field, the ad note field will become required.
Require a user specifies a section when creating a print ad order.
You can also limit the sections that are available for a user to select based on your rate cards.
Important
A section in the system is typically used for a special area in your magazine. If you require a section, you may want to consider adding a section that is labeled 'run of book'. This will allow the rep to specify a section, but not a specific section
By default, the position field is optional for print ad sales. Set this configuration to yes to make position a required field. When the field is required. You must have at least one position available on a rate card for a user to select, otherwise, they won't be able to enter an order.
Positions can affect pricing and have inventory controls.
By default, the channel field is optional for digital ad sales. Set this configuration to yes to make channel a required field. When the field is required, You must have at least one channel available for a user to select, otherwise, they won't be able to enter an order.
Channels can affect pricing and have inventory controls.
You can choose which types of digital ads sales require a start and end date. CPD sales must have a start and end date. You can choose to require the range fields on orders for CPM, CPF, or all types.
Choose how you would like the start and end date range on digital ads sales to choose your issues.
Anytime Within Month – The system will select all issues with a reporting date in the same month of the date range.
Within Exact Range – The system will select all issues that have a reporting date within the exact range of the dates selected.
Do Not Auto-Select Issues – The system will not select any issues.
You can have the system prorate your digital units based on the run date of the ad. The system gives you four options for proration: CPM Daily, CPM Issue, All by Issue. If you do not want to prorate your digital impressions, set the configuration to no.
The description below will all use the same scenario: a digital order with a run date of 4/1-6/1, for 180,000 units, for 3 issues.
No: Setting the system to no means that the units and run date you add on a when adding a digital line will apply to all line items. The system will create 3 line items with the same run date and units.
CPM Daily: The rule will only apply to CPM based digital ads. You must enter a run date on a digital line item to prorate the impressions. The system will take the total days in the run date and divide the units by the number of days. Then the system will distribute the units and price across each issue.
CPM Issue: The rule will only apply to CPM based digital ads. You must enter a run date on the digital line item to prorate the impressions. The system will create 3 line items, each with a unit value of 60,000. One line item will be from 4/1 – 4/30, one from 5/1-5/30, and the last one from 6/1-6/30.
ALL By Issue: The rule will apply to all Frequency types. You will see the same behavior as you get in CPM Issue, but now the system will prorate CPC, CPA, and CPC ads in the same manner. The big difference is with CPF ads. The system will still apply 1 unit to each issue selected. The price of each item will also be the same as normal. But the system will break up the run dates to have one item from 4/1 – 4/30, one from 5/1-5/30, and the last one from 6/1-6/30.
Contract Expiry Days In Advance determines how many days before the expiration date to schedule the to-do activity. In the above example, the rep would get an activity created 30 days before the expiration of the contract, and the activity date would be on 10-25, 7 days before the contract expiration.
Days out to look for expiring contracts and create a to-do activity for the primary rep.
Require a user to set a close date when they enter an opportunity. The close ate fields is when the opportunity is expected to be turned into an order. You can use the close date as in a filter in forecast reports.
There are four options for automatically approve orders: No, Publisher, Client, and Finance. The option you choose determines what stage of an approval an order is in when a user first enters the order into the system.
No – setting the system to no means the order will go to the lowest level of approval. The order will require approval by a manager, the client, and finance.
Organization or Publisher – setting the system to publisher bypasses a managers approval. The order will be at 90% and needs approval by the client and finance.
Client – setting the system to client means the order bypasses manager and client approval. The order will need to be approved by finance.
Finance – setting the system to finance means the order requires no approval. The order will be considered 100% as soon as it is entered.
Note
One exception to automatic finance approval is if the order has installment billing. If an order has installment billing, it will still need to be manually finance approved, regardless of this configuration.
Tip
Best Practice: It is highly recommended that you require all orders go through the Organization or Publisher approval, especially when you are first starting out. This will ensure that your sales reps are setting up the orders correctly, and the pricing is correct. The system will email the user that is set in the 'reports to' field on user configuration. There is also a widget on your dashboard.
When this setting is changed to yes, orders for companies that are outside the new account threshold will automatically be financed approve, even if you require Finance approval.
You may want to use this configuration if you only want the finance team to approve orders for new companies; Maybe to do a credit check or make sure the first payment is provided in advance.
Limit the sale of premium positions and digital sizes based on issue availability. A user without the permission to oversell inventory will not be able to add a new order if there is no more inventory. You can give a user permission to bypass print and digital advertisement inventory management controls.
Please note that the system does not restrict overselling at final approval. The system will notify the user if an oversold situation will occur by approving the order.
You can choose to count pending orders for inventory management. For example, if you have 1 OBC position on an order waiting for approval for the OBC, another user won’t have the ability to enter another order for the OBC position. If you don’t count pending ad sale items against inventory, users could have multiple orders for the 1 OBC position.
The configuration is only relevant if you enable Use Inventory Management.
Tip
Best Practice: We would recommend using the pending ad sales count towards inventory. It will be really helpful in preventing the overselling of both your print and digital items. You will also need to make sure that you have set your inventory levels on each issue for these settings to work correctly. The system will set all the inventory to unlimited by default.
Add an option to group line items on an order. Grouping can change how line items display on your contract templates and impact your invoicing. You can use group to make sure some line items are on the same invoice and limit the pricing displayed to the customer.
Make sure to set up your display group options if you enable this feature. The display group options determine the invoice behavior of the group and the name will display on the contract.
You also need to make sure you add the group/package element to your templates, or grouped items won't show up on your contracts.
Set this to yes to have the system add contacts to the order fields based on a company’s contact settings. For example, the billing contact on the order will populate with the company's default billing contact if enabled.
If you set this to no, a user will always have to choose the contacts for an order.
Turning this setting to Yes will allow your users the ability to sell a service in the system. When the setting is set to no, you would not be able to sell a service item in your instance.
Tip
Services are typically used to sell items that are not related to publication and issue sales. (i.e. Production or Design fees, Micro-sites, Sponsorships & Booth sales, etc.)
Display Ad Line Item Pricing details during the add and edit process of order entry.
You can limit what publications a sales rep can sell on orders. You can choose what publications a sales rep can sell by editing their user profile and adding publications to their Publication/Title Assignments. The users will only see their assigned publication in the publication drop-downs on media sales items.
Tip
If your organization sells to multiple publications, but your sales reps only sell to specific publications, this is how you can restrict the publications that they can sell into. We recommend putting the end date for the assignment to something very far in the future to ensure the publication is always available to be sold, but you can use this to make a publication available for a specific time period if needed. There is also a permission setting that will need to be added to the user for this setting to take effect.
Enable this feature to prevent a user from editing an order after the order has been approved by the Organization or Publisher. If set to Yes, the user who created the order can’t edit line item pricing of the order before the order is sent to the client for approval.
Display your installment payment schedule when adding or editing orders. When enabled, a user can create an installment schedule, which will show on the contract templates. The installment invoices may or may not be created as soon as the order is approved; this will depend on your installment invoice settings.
Specify whether to include all active proposals in forecasts. If set to no, only proposals sent to a customer for signature will show up in your forecast reports.
Number of days before a recurring item expires that it will be replicated. For example, if you set this to 30, the system will find all items that are going to expire in 30 days and trigger the recurrence of the line item based on the recurrence line item setting.
Important
It is important that you set this date to something like 30 to 60 days to ensure the new items are created in time for production and finance. This will also help with sales reporting.
Filter available Order Ad Item territories using the Market or Publication. This configuration is only relevant for Zone based sales.
If you add 1000 each circulation value added will represent 1000. For example, if you add a qty of 7 with this configuration set to 1000, the system will price the item as if there are 7000 units.
They are multiple parts of your site you may want to review before using this module. Make user you have the following items set up.