NetSuite : SheKnows Media Consolidates Multiple Systems onto NetSuite OneWorld Extends Leadership in Women’s-Focused Digital Publishing

Posted by Chris Hering, Director, Product Marketing NetSuite GBU at Oracle

SheKnows Media built its growing women's-focused digital publishing empire on the foundation that it knows its voice and its impassioned audience. It's a promise that has kept advertisers flocking to SheKnows Media properties that reach more than 70+ million unique visitors every month.

Leaders knew that maintaining this momentum would require finding a sustainable solution to one of the industry's biggest challenges - leveraging the ever expanding data to deliver on its promise and innovate its products.

'In order to support the growth in our business and continue helping marketers reach their audience through passionate content creators and influencers, we knew we needed to conquer the challenge of a multitude of disparate data sources,' said SheKnows CFO Franklin Vincent.

The New York- and Arizona-based company knew the first step to managing that challenge was first to remove the complexities in its back office operations.

Unified Platform

SheKnows had been running NetSuite since early 2013, when it implemented the system after its spin out from a former owner. When it acquired Stylecaster and Blogher in late 2014, it inherited a QuickBooks system, as well as Intacct. The resultant hodgepodge of financial systems made consolidating, analyzing and reporting revenue across the portfolio of sites inefficient, requiring accounting to export data to Excel. These inefficiencies were exacerbated with changing revenue recognition standards, which required more robust controls and accounting functionality.

Its landscape was further complicated by the lack of integration between financial software and software running operational and order management processes, obscuring an end-to-end view of the business.

Encouraged by its positive experience leveraging NetSuite for the parent company, SheKnows decided to extend its use across its properties, migrating both acquisitions and the parent company to NetSuite OneWorld. NetSuite's powerful custom GL feature gives SheKnows deep, real-time reporting on financials across its brands, properties and channels, empowering executives to make informed strategic decisions. Efficiency has soared, with hours of manual work eliminated in revenue recognition, billing and payments, consolidation and monthly financial close.

NetSuite's powerful and flexible development platform combined with its unified platform for financials has positioned the business to easily integrate third party and proprietary applications to gain a holistic view of its business and mine its data. It integrated NetSuite OneWorld with its Momentum platform (a proprietary content and analytics platform) and PayPal, and plans to integrate its Operative order management software as well. The integrations make it easier to pull relevant, reliable data to both share with clients, and create role-based dashboards to empower strategic decisions internally.

'NetSuite has been an amazingly flexible and powerful tool for us to integrate these data points within our data warehouse, Vincent said. 'Our decision-making has been enhanced by our ability to create the right views of products that has informed us not only about our current business, but has provided support for launching new products.'.

With NetSuite as its partner, SheKnows is poised for continued innovation in the digital media industry. It plans to implement the Advanced Revenue module to provide billing flexibility and get more in-depth about how it forecasts revenue. NetSuite OneWorld quickly scales to onboard new acquisitions, and perpetuate the advantages borne of an end-to-end view of business.

'NetSuite is really limitless in what you can do with it,' said Samantha Sistek, SheKnows Assistant Controller. 'I haven't found something that I can't do yet.'

To learn more about how SheKnows is leveraging NetSuite OneWorld to grow its women-focused digital publishing empire, watch this video and check out this case study.