How to best manage advertising spend? Client stories.

The two pillars of advertising spend

Managing your advertising budget is a task that requires time and frequent attention. In many cases, different teams are managing multiple projects at the same time. When your CMO wants to systematize the process, it makes sense to introduce an advertising agency.

Kishor Sridhar is a german management consultant, publicist, book author, and a public speaker. For years, his business has relied heavily on advertising. Before switching to Payhawk for his expense management, Kishor covered his advertising expenses on 5 different credit cards split across different teams. He even gave access to these funds to external advertising agencies so that the process was smoother.

Credit cards are excellent when used the right way. In Kishor’s case, his employees and the external agencies used 5 different cards for all their spending. Frankly, this is a solution, and for a time, it worked. However, can you imagine accounting for all these expenses? Let’s say you wanted to check on how much was the spending on the new advertising campaign you started. Well, you couldn’t. There will be a blunder of transactions, and if you wanted to do a quick estimate, you would have spent the effort of building a full-blown report.

“It was quite difficult to track 4-5 credit cards. If something was wrong, It took a lot of time and effort to fi gure it out.”

Obviously, scaling up such an endeavor wouldn’t work. After all, business comes down to establishing trust. When you have frequent spending from your employees and external advertising agencies, accountability is crucial. He found out about Payhawk when he was looking for a smarter way to manage his money. The ability to track spending in real-time, coupled with higher credit limits, was the missing ingredient he needed. For Kishor, the two pillars when it comes to managing money are transparency and control. Kishor chose Payhawk for one simple reason.

“Payhawk’s platform is like a cockpit that provides me with the ability to manage advertising spend in a controlled and transparent way. The fl exible card management allows me to monitor all spending in real-time and provides me with peace of mind when I need to give access to funds to external employees.”

The ability to treat your company’s money like your own makes spending easier to track. It removes the tricky element of not remembering which employee authorized payment or subscription renewal. The final touch of this is that you are the owner of the information. With a few simple clicks, you can set up custom filters to help you see what’s your spending. Having this, now you have everything to see whether the channels you are using are helping or not.

Armed with all that information, Kishor now pursues another venture. Focused on delivering value, rather than looking for expenses, Kishor launched VirtualRunners. The mission of VirtualRunners is to give back the pure competitive feeling to runners during the COVID pandemic.

The other side of the story

External advertising agencies have precisely the same pain points, but from a different perspective. They allocate budgets to a range of various campaigns, platforms, and tools. Having more customers is a blessing, but when you have difficulties in expense management, it quickly becomes a curse.

VertoDigital is a digital advertising agency that is people-centric and focused on delivering organic value. Bilyana Katmarova is managing the finances of the VertoDigital, and she faced precisely the same problem that Payhawk happened to solve.

“Well, we are probably not your typical user. Yes, we have a lot of spending, but for us, the biggest issue is the card limits. Payhawk offered us high-limit corporate cards and more intuitive interface.”

The higher limits, coupled with the debit card, provide Bilyana and her team with the ability to focus on their daily activities without increasing complexity. Keeping it simple helps their process stay the same and allows them to focus all of their attention on their customers.

How is this relevant to you?

Managing advertising spend is crucial for companies of any size. The value of having exact numbers for each campaign or team and swiftly understanding what works and what doesn’t today, in time of COVID-19, is unprecedented. With Payhawk you can monitor tightly all your budgets and also control all your spending in one single tool. Moreover, you can issue corporate cards instantly and also benefit from better exchange rates than any commercial bank. If you want to know more, book a demo with us and we can explain more.