Unclear campaign budgets weigh on finance administration
The finance administration of a media agency plans around 900 campaign budgets a month. A workflow structures requirements and coordination.
- Media
- Accounting
Key metric
Processing time per budget
7035min
Average processing time per campaign budget
At a glance
Starting point
A large media agency continuously runs campaigns in TV, online, print and out-of-home for numerous clients. For this, the finance administration plans and updates around 900 campaign budgets every month. Requests come from sales and consulting, often as free text in emails or presentations. Budget frameworks, runtimes, channels and discounts are maintained in different Excel files. The ERP system only reflects approved budgets, and changes during the month are tracked in separate lists. Three employees spend almost all their time collecting, checking and updating budget information.
- 900
- Campaign budgets per month
- 3
- Full-time staff in the budget team
The challenge
The finance administration has to make sure campaign budgets are complete, plausible and aligned with client agreements. In practice, details on channels, runtimes or discounts are often missing or contradict earlier agreements. Around 360 clarification cases arise every month, which are followed up by email and chat. Changes during the runtime are often reported only shortly before month-end, which makes planning cash flows harder. The team manually creates comparison lists between requests, Excel plans and ERP data. As a result, approvals are delayed, and the agency risks overspending or unused budgets that only become visible at the monthly close.
Typical symptoms in the company
Why this remained unsolved
The problem had been known for years but was considered an unavoidable consequence of individual client requirements. A classic IT project for budget planning failed because of the variety of campaigns and the many free-text details. Standard workflows in the ERP system were too rigid to handle special cases and client-specific agreements. At the same time, a complete in-house development was hard to justify, since the finance administration was heavily loaded but seen as pure overhead. So the agency stuck with manual Excel solutions and checklists that did not solve the underlying problem of scattered information.
Our solution
The agency introduced an agentic workflow that takes in budget requests from emails, presentations and spreadsheets, structures them and matches them against existing data. A central assistant guides sales and consulting through a guided intake, fills in missing details from earlier campaigns and suggests budget structures. For the finance administration, the system produces consolidated budget drafts with clear assumptions, deviations from client agreements and notes on discounts. Approved budgets are written to the ERP automatically, while ongoing changes are versioned and documented with comments. The result is a continuous, traceable budget process across all channels.
Where generative AI comes in
Generative AI analyzes free-text briefs, emails and presentations, identifies relevant budget parameters and drafts structured budgets. Based on similar campaigns, it suggests sensible allocations and discounts and explains its assumptions in plain language. This lets it interpret incomplete information, offer alternatives and prepare follow-up questions for the business teams.
- Intake agent that collects budget requests from emails, presentations and spreadsheets, structures them and identifies missing mandatory details
- Planning assistant for sales and consulting that suggests budget allocation, runtimes and channels based on earlier campaigns
- Review module for the finance administration that highlights deviations from client agreements, discounts and internal policies
- Synchronization with the ERP system that writes approved budgets, documents versions and logs changes traceably
From briefing to approved budget
Bundle intake
Budget requests from emails, presentations and spreadsheets are recognized automatically, assigned to the right clients and campaigns and converted into a uniform structure.
Create a draft
The assistant fills in missing details, suggests budget allocations and discounts and produces a consistent budget draft with clearly documented assumptions.
Expert review
The finance administration gets an overview of deviations from agreements, can adjust amounts, add comments and flag open points for clarification.
Approval and handover
After approval, the workflow writes the budget to the ERP, creates versioned documentation and informs sales and consulting of the final status.
Manage changes
Ongoing adjustments are captured as change requests, matched against existing budgets and, after review, transferred to the ERP as new versions.
Measured: after six months in production
Period: after six months in production.
| Metric | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Processing time per budgetKey metric | from 70 to 35 minutes per budget | Time tracking before/aftermeasured |
| Clarification cases per month | down from 360 to 140 clarification cases | System measurementestimated |
| Quality of budget draftsQuality measure | around 85 percent without content corrections | Sampleclient-reported |
Cost-effectiveness
The solution is particularly suited to campaigns with recurring structures. Highly individual large projects with complex special agreements still require manual review so that financial risks and client expectations are taken into account.
Integration and operations
Transferability
The approach works wherever budgets or cost frameworks emerge from free-text briefings, spreadsheets and emails and several teams are involved. By combining generative analysis, structured suggestions and clear approval steps, other organizations can also reduce clarification cases and shorten planning cycles without ignoring individual agreements.
A similar case in your organization? Let’s talk.
Briefly describe your process. We’ll get back to you with an initial assessment of whether the pattern can be transferred, and what it realistically takes.