bluTonic Transformed its Partner Experience with Payables Automation

Digital advertising is a playground for innovation. For Los Angeles-based bluTonic, innovation is the research and development of tools that optimize the experience between users and ads.

Founded by Mirza Ibrahimovic and Adam Grossman in 2010, bluTonic is a leader in data aggregation, targeting intelligence, and consumer retention. With decades of online experience, bluTonic has created revenue enhancement systems that connect both consumers and brands.

But for Mirza Ibrahimovic, CEO at bluTonic, the company’s rapid growth and manual processes were putting a strain on its lean finance team.

“Our publishers are international. Some require us to wire money. Some require ACH transfers. Some require PayPal and other forms of payment. It was way too complex to manage in-house with a small accounting team.”

Previously, bluTonic’s finance team had to onboard every single publisher individually. If a new publisher wanted to join their network, they would have to process that internally and manually upload their payment data, account information, and payment method.

“We were serving as a clearinghouse for our publishers by manually putting payments together and reconciling data. It made our accounts payable system very complex and laborious.”

This inefficient onboarding workflow slowed down bluTonic’s operations exponentially and negatively impacted their partner experience. As Ibrahimovic states,

“Without our publishers, we don’t have a business. They’re our core product.”

BluTonic needed to implement an automated payables solution that would improve publisher onboarding, eliminate manual processes, and increase compliance and fraud controls.

“Tipalti allows us to have one central hub where we can issue all payments at once rather than one by one. At the end of each month, we reconcile all of our server numbers and upload those numbers into Tipalti to issue payments. We no longer have to rely on human data entry, and it’s prevented a lot of errors that we’ve experienced over the years.”

Once bluTonic implemented Tipalti, nearly every area of the business improved. Publishers are now responsible for their own W9 tax forms and preferred payment methods. Plus, Tipalti resolved issues with publishers changing banks, websites, and entities and streamlined communications between all parties. Additionally, the team eliminated the need to dedicate an entire resource to manage compliance and onboarding.

“Automation has allowed us to focus on the big picture and long-term vision. Previously, we were scrambling every month to issue thousands of payments to various publishers. We now have that automated and can focus on financial forecasting.”

Today, Ibrahimovic can strategically assess bluTonic’s direction and needs. Thanks to automation, bluTonic can keep up with their continued growth and elevate their team to financial strategists.

“Our team is no longer overqualified data entry accountants. Now, they can spend their time on modeling and projections— they can focus on more business-critical projects.”