Manual Reconciliation Bottlenecks in Ad Revenue Processing

$10,000–$30,000 per month in wasted capacity from roughly 32% of reconciliation and yield ops time locked in low-value spreadsheet work instead of optimizing inventory, troubleshooting discrepancies, and supporting higher-yield advertiser packages, plus missed upside from conservative forecasting based on incomplete data. • $15,000-$35,000/month (assumes 0.5 FTE at $100K salary + margin variance from mis-allocation of $5K-$20K due to tier attribution errors) • $20,000-$40,000/month in unresolved programmatic discrepancies (1-3% of typical SSP/DSP monthly margin on $2-5M in cleared transactions)

Analysts download CSVs from each SSP/DSP, normalize columns by hand, maintain giant reconciliation workbooks, and chase differences via email threads with network reps, often tracking issues in ad hoc notes and color-coded cells. • Content Licensing Manager or finance exports partner network revenue reports, manually filters out licensed-content placements, applies contract-specific rev-share formulas in Excel, and reconciles the results with invoices and payments from those networks. • Editor relies on ad ops and finance teams emailing and Slacking fragmentary spreadsheets, then manually pastes pivot tables into their own Excel/Google Sheets dashboards to estimate revenue and delivery by brand while waiting for the 'real' reconciled numbers.