Sovrn Saved Four Days Each Month with Tipalti

Storytellers make the internet a better place.

Sovrn, a digital advertising platform based in Boulder, Colorado, provides advertising tools, technologies, and services to tens of thousands of content creators— helping them make money, grow their businesses, and access a massive data commons that provides extraordinary insights. According to Sovrn’s Financial Controller, Abby Herlein, Sovrn “helps publishers do more of what they love and less of what they don’t.”

As a financial leader, Abby wanted to build an organization that could efficiently access its own performance metrics. From the CEO to investors to customers, everyone should understand the Sovrn business model and the parameters for success. For Sovrn, publishers come first and the importance of a streamlined payments process is imperative to the success of the business.

With thousands of publishers to pay every month, Sovrn had previously used Bill.com to manage payments. However, several of their publishers were international or wanted to be paid by PayPal, and Bill.com’s limited capabilities forced Sovrn to pay these partners manually, outside of the system.

With thousands of transactions each month, Sovrn was struggling to keep up with payment operations. To manage everything efficiently and to the level of detail needed, Abby would have had to hire two additional full-time employees.

“It was essentially impossible to keep up. We needed to either hire more people or find a technology solution that could help us.”

By upgrading to Tipalti, Sovrn was able to complete its monthly payables process in less than two hours. In addition, Abby saw dramatic time savings with onboarding publishers due to the automatic collection of publisher banking information and W-9 forms.

Plus, publishers can now manage their payment preferences in real-time without having to contact Sovrn support. It all goes back to making it easy for Sovrn’s customers—the publishers.

“Before, our operations were very clunky and manual. Now, it’s a streamlined process and a much better experience for everyone involved.”

For Sovrn, Tipalti consolidated multiple approval workflows into fewer steps. Abby can review a payment file, upload it to the system, obtain the CFO’s approval, and pay all of Sovrn’s publishers every few weeks.

Also, Tipalti’s implementation allows any member of the Sovrn team to access the information in the system quickly. They can log in, get the information they need, and move on to more critical tasks like supporting their publishers.

For an organization dedicated to greater technological freedom and mobility, Sovrn’s payables solution is suited for exactly that.

“We’re here to help the business and help our publishers—we want to make it easy for them.”