Oklahoma Magazine is published monthly to serve the Tulsa metropolitan area.

In order serve the needs of its advertisers, Oklahoma Magazine offers a wide variety of advertising agreements. Each agreement can be adjusted to accommodate different ad sizes, placement, issue coverage, and various levels of production support.

Dan Schuman, the Publisher, could see that a key administrative roadblock was the monthly billing process, which involved manually entering invoices into QuickBooks based on the options for each individual agreement. Dan could also see an opportunity within this problem: if a software system could be created to automate the monthly billing, the database for this system would allow more effective and efficient management of the advertising sales process.

When Dan told us about his ideas for creating a comprehensive advertising agreement management system, we knew that he was on the right track and we agreed to deliver a new system, called Ad Express, based on Dan’s concept.

Work on Ad Express started at the end of June 2005. A complete design specification was prepared and reviewed during the first half of July. The system was installed for testing at the beginning of August, and was in full operation in time for the August billing cycle.

The system features a custom user interface for adding, editing and extending advertising agreements (see screen shot), contact management screens and reports, as well as reports that support and simplify sales management. When each issue of Oklahoma Magazine is “put to bed”, invoices are prepared automatically based on the advertising agreement data, which is already in the system database.

• Microsoft Access
• QuickBooks