GoDigital Media Group Scales Multi-Subsidiary, Global Financial Operations in Digital Media

HQ Marina Del Rey, CA
Customer Since 2018

Industry Media & Entertainment

• Achieved 4-week time-to-value implementation of Tipalti across multiple subsidiaries and global payees
• Reduced AP workload by 20 days annually
• Automated operations for both mass global royalties payouts and invoice-backed payables

Listing Janet Jackson as one of its featured artists, GoDigital Media Group holds several innovative business subsidiaries that sit at the intersection of music and technology. The mission for its subsidiary companies is to help music and entertainment content owners manage, market, and monetize their products. These subsidiaries include music label and distributor Cinq Music, music television network VidaPrimo, and social media monetization service AdShare.

It’s an exciting growth period at GoDigital Media Group. As CFO Hunter Paletsas explained, “We’re in growth mode right now, raising money, buying music rights, buying music licenses, and monetizing those assets on digital platforms.”

A big part of the holding company’s growth strategy is operating globally and conducting business across borders. “We’re live in 16 countries, with boots on the ground. We have major hubs in Belgium, Colombia, Belarus, and Sri Lanka. We’re a global company, and we make global payments,” says Paletsas.

The challenge for a lean operations team making global payments was elevated when its original payments platform Bill.com could not continue to make payments to Puerto Rico or to many other countries where GoDigital needed to send payments.

We were doing a lot of international bank transactions, and those foreign-transaction fees were hitting us hard in the pocketbook. Since we are a Latin music label, when Bill.com informed us that they no longer could service Puerto Rican banks, we needed a better payment solution. 

Making the move to Tipalti was a quick time-to-value implementation with GoDigital’s global suppliers and entities.

From sign up to implementation, we went live in four weeks, which was incredibly fast. It’s been smooth sailing since, and our clients love it.

Today, GoDigital has two payment operations: one for mass royalty payments globally, and the other for making invoice-backed payments. And Tipalti has automated each process.

Paletsas describes GoDigital’s current automated payment process like this: “We receive invoices via email that can have any type of attachments—JPEGs, PDFs—and this automatically gets processed into Tipalti. Each invoice is scanned using OCR [optical character recognition] that prepopulates data, GL [general ledger] accounts,[and the] payment type our supplier has chosen, which makes it very easy for our AP staff. When they pick up that invoice, there’s no data entry really.”

The biggest value for Paletsas and his team is gaining a tremendous amount of time back for more strategic work growing the company. “I’m getting 20 days a year back from not having to process AP manually. Everything is always available in the Tipalti system; it’s the one source of truth, finally, for our payments,” says Paletsas. “I’m spending more time structuring deals and really focusing on all the strategic aspects of helping the business. I’m freed from the administrative operative burden I had before.”

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