Sales Key Concepts

Be aware of the following terminology.

Deals

The Sales module contains information about the advertisements you sell. These sales are organized into Deals that contain the details of the buy including the parties involved, the terms, conditions, and financial arrangements.

Within the Sales module, the deal has a configurable workflow that it moves through on its way to being approved both internally and by your customer. The system must be configured so Finance data is created at the workflow status when the deal is considered a fully approved contractual commitment and this is known as being Active. You typically review invoice data for deals within the Finance module when a billing period ends, but after a deal is considered Active, its invoices are visible within the Finance module even for future periods.

Sales Line Items

A Line Item is the part of the sales deal that specifies the details of a specific ad. For example, a line item specifies the dates when an ad runs, the type of ad, the targeting, the pricing, the product, and other specific details. A deal can contain many line items describing different ads sold to the same advertiser.

A package line item is a collection of line items within the deal that are normally sold together. In the Finance module, you normally only invoice for the package/group (parent) and that represents the sum of all the ads within that group.

Product

Each line item has a Product. A product defines many important details of what was sold, including pricing, targeting, and ad slot details. A package is a collection of products that are sold together as a package/group line item.

Calendar / Billing Period

A Calendar defines a set of billing periods, which are time frames that an organization uses for scheduling financial activities, such as billing, revenue, payables, and receivables.

Administrators define how billing periods and fiscal calendars are set up in the System Configuration module. A standard (Gregorian) calendar can be set to start the fiscal year at any month. You can also define non-standard broadcast calendars where months contain 5 or 4 full weeks so that each month always begins on the same day of the week.

Invoice

An Invoice corresponds to the portion of a deal’s financial data in a specific billing period. Deals that span multiple billing periods are broken up and invoiced across all those periods. For example, if billing periods are based on calendar months and a deal runs from January through the end of June, its billing is broken up across six billing periods producing six invoices each corresponding to a month.

Invoice Line Item

An Invoice Line Item corresponds to the portion of a sales line item during a specific billing period.

Each line item within a deal has a Can Invoice checkbox in Sales. This is typically checked by default for non-packaged line items and that means the line item is represented within the Finance module. A Sales user can uncheck the Can Invoice box for a line item if for some reason they do not want it billed. When using packages, typically either the parent or its children are checked but not both, although the system does not prevent overbilling if both are checked.