UK · Media & Advertising
MultiLocal Media
“Every month, the same ten days. Same spreadsheets. Same arguments about whose number was right.”
5–10 day manual consolidation cycle cut to zero - single source of truth with real-time margin visibility.
Key Results
Eliminated
5–10 day cycle
Now runs automatically overnight
1 platform
Source of truth
Was 3 disputed systems
Real-time
Margin visibility
Was weeks after period end
0
Manual reconciliation steps
All automated via Power Automate
Tech Stack
The Situation
At MultiLocal Media, the end of every reporting period triggered the same predictable cycle. The Sales team would export their numbers. The Finance team would run their revenue calculations. Operations would pull margin data from yet another system. Someone would combine all three into a master spreadsheet - and then the disputes would begin. Sales showed one revenue figure. Finance showed a different one. Nobody could explain the gap quickly. The reconciliation process alone took days. By the time a clean, agreed set of numbers was ready to present to leadership, it was 8–10 business days into the next period. They were making decisions about current performance using last month's data. And the margin picture - the most commercially critical number in a media business - was always the last thing resolved and the least trusted.
If you run operations in media, advertising, or any multi-channel commercial business, this pattern will be familiar:
- ✓
Sales, Finance, and Operations each have their own version of the revenue number - and they never match on the first try
- ✓
Your monthly close involves days of manual reconciliation before you can trust any of the numbers
- ✓
Margin is the number that takes longest to calculate and is most often disputed
- ✓
Leadership is making decisions in the first two weeks of a new period based on last period's incomplete data
- ✓
You've built reconciliation processes to patch around the data quality problem rather than fixing the underlying cause
- ✓
"Which system is the source of truth?" is a question nobody can answer definitively
If three or more of these describe your operation, you're looking at the right case study.
The Root Problem
- 1
No single source of truth - Sales, Finance, and Operations each maintained separate records with different figures for the same metrics
- 2
Manual consolidation of the three sources took 5–10 business days per reporting period
- 3
The reconciliation process was fragile, manually intensive, and entirely dependent on individuals who knew the spreadsheet structure
- 4
Real-time margin visibility didn't exist - gross margin was only calculable after the consolidation cycle completed
- 5
Leadership decisions were systematically made on the previous period's stale, consolidated data
How We Fixed It
Identify where the reconciliation breaks down - precisely
The first step was mapping the exact points in the data chain where the three systems diverged. We found three root causes: (1) revenue recognition timing was different in the booking system vs. finance ledger, (2) campaign costs were being entered manually into a spreadsheet that had no live connection to actual spend, and (3) margin calculations were done differently by Finance and Operations with different cost allocation assumptions. Each had a specific fix.
Build a unified Power Apps data entry platform
Rather than trying to integrate three legacy systems with incompatible structures, we built a unified Power Apps platform as the single point of entry for Sales, Campaign, and Cost data. Teams now enter data once, in one place, with validation rules that prevent the input errors that had previously caused reconciliation failures downstream.
Automate the consolidation with Power Automate
Four Power Automate flows replaced the manual consolidation process: (1) Revenue recognition - automatically applies consistent timing rules across all bookings. (2) Cost aggregation - pulls actual spend from connected ad platforms and allocates by campaign. (3) Margin calculation - runs automatically on a defined schedule using agreed cost allocation logic. (4) Period close - triggers a reconciliation check and flags any variance above threshold before the numbers go to leadership.
Power BI for live Sales, Revenue, and Margin visibility
Three Power BI dashboards were built on top of the unified data: Sales (bookings, pipeline, conversion by team and channel), Revenue (live recognised revenue by product and client), and Margin (gross margin by client, campaign type, and channel in real time). Leadership now opens a dashboard - not a spreadsheet - on any day of the month.
Measured Outcomes
Manual consolidation cycle
5–10 business days
Fully automated overnight
↑ Key win
Source of truth
None - three disputed systems
Single unified platform
↑ Key win
Margin visibility
Weeks after period end
Real-time Power BI
Revenue reporting
Manual, periodic, disputed
Automated, live, agreed
Reconciliation failures
Regular - caused by manual input
Near-zero - validated at input
What This Means For You
What this means for media, advertising, and multi-channel commercial businesses
The multi-day reconciliation cycle that plagues media and advertising businesses is almost always caused by the same structural problem: data enters the business through multiple channels, gets stored in multiple systems with different logic, and then has to be manually unified before anyone can trust it. The fix is to flip the sequence - unify the data at entry, automate the consolidation logic, and let reporting be an output of a trusted system rather than a manual process that produces a trusted number. If your Finance and Sales teams are still arguing about whose revenue figure is right at the end of every month, the problem is the architecture, not the people.
Next Step
Is this your situation?
Book a 30-minute call. No slides, no pitch. We'll look at your specific setup, tell you what's causing the problem, and what a realistic fix looks like - including timeline and cost range.