Marathon Ventures

The Company: About Marathon Ventures

Marathon Ventures oversees sales operations for various content proprietors and distributors, utilizing advanced technology to craft exclusive, market-proven methodologies that optimize the unique dynamics of the media industry. These strategies encompass direct response initiatives and paid programming endeavors.

Marathon Ventures specializes in securing exclusive rights to manage the sale of direct response and paid programming commercial slots across television networks, station groups, and program distributors. Our comprehensive services encompass every aspect of the sales process, from pricing and planning to negotiation, trafficking, invoicing, billing, collection, and remittance to rights holders. Among our esteemed clients are industry leaders such as Fox Business News, MGM Television Distribution, Raycom Media, Tribune Media, and The Tennis Channel.

The Situation: Rapid Sales Growth Decreased Financial Efficiency

Setting the Strategy

Marathon Ventures experienced substantial sales growth, resulting in heightened demands for transactional data exchange with advertisers, advertising agencies, and media clients. To sustain the intricate and personalized Finan​cial​Force​.com system, the finance team invested around $8,000 per year in technology consultancy services. Seeking efficiency, Marathon Ventures decided to transition to a new cloud-based ERP software solution to streamline operations.

The Solution: Sage Intacct

Streamlining Operations through Automated Business Processes

Marathon Ventures achieved streamlined processes by integrating Sage Intacct with other best-in-class applications such as Salesforce for CRM and Concur for time and expenses. This integration significantly reduces duplicate data entry while ensuring seamless flow of crucial employee and sales data directly into Sage Intacct. The implementation of Sage Intacct has resulted in enhanced efficiency and success for Marathon Ventures.

“After seeing a Sage Intacct demo, it was immediately clear to us that this was a highly intuitive solution and could produce much more accurate, reliable financial data for our business,” describes Sabry Mohideen, CFO at Marathon Ventures. ​“We chose Sage Intacct over other cloud software on the market because it was built as a solid multi-ledger accounting system with sophisticated financial controls and flexible reporting – all seamlessly integrated with Salesforce.”

The Results: Sage Intacct Implementation Benefits

Through the integration of Sage Intacct, Marathon Ventures achieved significant streamlining across various operations, including invoicing, accounts receivables, accounts payables, and bank reconciliations. Previously, the finance team was burdened with manual creation of payables entries for each advertiser payment, particularly challenging when payments were linked to multiple invoices.

In contrast, the entire workflow, spanning from generating advertiser invoices to processing payments, has been seamlessly automated through Sage Intacct, resulting in a saving of five person-hours per month. These streamlined processes also translate into significant time savings for check runs, which previously required a full week but are now accomplished in just approximately two days with Sage Intacct.

Sage Intacct has significantly improved the company’s monthly closing process, reducing it by several days, while financial report preparation has been simplified to just a few mouse clicks. The reconciliation of subledgers to the general ledger has also become more streamlined and faster, allowing the finance team to promptly identify and resolve issues within Sage Intacct. Sabry highlights that bank reconciliation is notably easier with Sage Intacct, saving his team nearly a full day each month.

A Better Business

Marathon Ventures has enhanced its financial visibility through Sage Intacct’s multi-dimensional reporting feature, offering quicker and more detailed insights into factors influencing company performance. With access to Sage Intacct’s library of 150 pre-built reports and the ability to easily generate custom reports without waiting for customization projects or relying on external tools, the business can swiftly analyze pertinent data. Utilizing the system, Marathon Ventures’ finance team generates monthly financial statements along with aging and open balance reports for customers and vendors.

Furthermore, Sage Intacct has facilitated the company’s effort to streamline its chart of accounts while maintaining reporting flexibility. Through the practice of tagging each transaction with pertinent dimensions such as network, advertiser, product, and brand, Marathon Ventures can efficiently categorize its data, enabling in-depth analysis and comparison of financial metrics among specific customers, vendors, and partners.

By utilizing Sage Intacct Performance Cards showcased on customized dashboards for stakeholders, company executives actively track crucial profit and loss trends on a quarterly and yearly basis. This enables them to gain immediate insights into the company’s standing at any given moment, ensuring that its growth aligns with expectations. This integration contributes to our ongoing success.