MetaViewer’s Cloud-based Solution Saved the Day for Media Company.

Situation: 

Trib Total Media, LLC is a multimedia distributor of news, information and advertising in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

 “By offering a multimedia suite of products and services including daily, weekly and monthly newspapers along with websites, digital advertising, direct mail, commercial printing and media planning, we are the single-source solution for all of your advertising and marketing needs.”

Trib Total Media has been using MetaViewer for about 10 years. “We started with Accounts Payable and General Ledger,” she said. “We had customizations done for the General Ledger which enabled us to key journal entries into our ERP system and then attach the backup in MetaViewer.”

Trib had been self-hosting their MetaViewer system through a traditional license, but one day they lost the internal connection. 

“We went from having OCR text recognition technology that pre-populated the invoice fields, to printing out and hand keying every invoice,” said Colleen Stuck, Senior Director Financial Controller. “The batches were then reviewed by a manager and posted. Being paperless for so long and then seeing how much paper we used for the year that we did not have access to the system was eye opening and seemed very wasteful.” 

It was a difficult prospect having to return to manual data entry. “The whole manual process that we were not used to was time-consuming and exhausting!” said Stuck.

Solution: 

Trib Total Media switched to MetaViewer’s AP automation cloud-based solution.

“We lost daily efficiencies and did not realize how fortunate we were to have a product that made our work life easier,” said Stuck. 

Trib Total Media worked with the MetaViewer team to get the new hosted system fully configured, which took a few months for the three companies under the Trib umbrella.

“Some of the queues we had with our internally hosted product were no longer available with the hosted solution, especially when it came to our General Ledger,” she said. 

It gave the team some time to review the workflow. “We also decided to change how invoices were approved.  With our prior system Managers approved and GL coded invoices.  With the new system, all invoices were coded in Final Review.”

Results:

Once Trib Total Media had access to MetaViewer’s cloud-based automation solution, they were back up and running, even better than before. 

“One good thing that came from this journey that we were on is we now have an upgraded product that is housed by Metafile,” said Stuck. 

New workflows and modules have helped speed things up and make the approval process easier.

“Processing is so much faster!  We no longer have to wait for processes to run to move data through the system.  Everything is instantaneous,” she said. “Also, from a managerial standpoint, we like having the General Ledger (specifically Journal Entries) on one screen to approve.”

Working with the MetaViewer team was also a positive experience for Trib Total Media. 

“The MetaViewer team we worked with were phenomenal,” said Stuck. “We had many calls to discuss the changes between our old versus new system and they were very patient with us when it came to discussing why we couldn’t have processes the same as what they were before.”

She added, “They took the time to get us the modifications that we needed along with getting most of the historical data in.”