Why Agencies love the NetSuite and Certinia Integration

Agencies love the NetSuite and Certinia integration because it combines best-in-class project management with a powerful financial engine, giving delivery and finance teams exactly what they need in one connected system.

Certinia handles project planning, resource scheduling, and time tracking, while NetSuite manages billing, accounting, and revenue recognition: eliminating the gap between project delivery and financial operations. Whether you bill fixed fee, by milestone, or by the hour, this hybrid ERP + PSA setup is built to scale with your model.

These three sub-verticals represent a broad range of companies, each with unique business models and operational needs.

• Under Agency, we typically work with organizations offering Creative Services, which can include promotional marketing, ad design, and merchandising; Marketing Services, such as outsourced campaign management, SEO, and web services.
• Media covers firms involved in Media and Ad Placement, including digital media buying, job board placements, and traditional media like newspaper, radio, and out-of-home advertising. It also includes Marketing Services, similar to Agencies, but more focused on the delivery of the Ad service itself
• Lastly, in the Professional Services space, we support firms offering Consulting, such as Accounting services firms, B2B eCommerce, public relations, or engineering advisory, as well as Services and Software Products, including SaaS companies, recruiters, telecom providers, and real estate firms.

Across all these types, the unifying theme is the complexity of managing projects, resources, and revenue often across multiple service lines and delivery models. That’s exactly where our experience and NetSuite solutions come in.

Now that we’ve outlined the AMP landscape, let’s take a closer look at what companies in this space need out of their tech stack.
Whether it’s a creative agency, a digital media placement firm, or a professional services provider, AMP companies share a few essential common traits:

• They deliver intangible services like creative work, strategy, and media buying.
• They operate on a project-based revenue model.
• Their billing cycles often rely on milestones or time tracked.
• And they manage high levels of operational complexity across multiple clients, campaigns, and internal teams.

These characteristics lead to specific operational needs, like accurate resource planning, real-time project visibility, streamlined delivery and billing, and scalable systems that reduce manual work.

That’s where our Appficiency solution comes in. We’ve tailored our delivery methodology and offerings to specifically cater to these challenges.

Here are some of the most common pain points we’ve addressed and how Appficieny’s ProjectSOS bundle of solutions for Agencies solves for them:

1. Managing multiple estimates or sales orders under a single contract — Our Consolidated Invoicing functionality helps streamline this by bundling sales orders into fewer, more manageable invoices.
2. Data management across multiple systems — We’ve solved and delivered 100s of standard and custom integrations that allow different systems to seamlessly communicate with NetSuite, enabling unified data flows.
3. Tracking budgets vs actuals by cost category — Our Job Costing solution enables project managers to monitor performance and spending by category every month keeping delivery aligned with budget.
4. Revenue recognition and cost alignment issues are often brought up — We’ve worked on key automations involving month-end processes to ensure accurate, scalable, and margin-aligned reporting.
5. Manual vendor billing and high payment processing costs — We’ve tailored NetSuite’s powerful P2P infrastructure with billing and payments workflows and integrations to reduce effort, lower fees, and improve cash flow.

Each of these is designed to align with how AMP firms already operate, rather than forcing them to change their processes to fit an ERP system.

Our experience has shown that at the heart of every successful implementation is a clear understanding of how a business truly operates today and as it scales and evolves.

That’s where our concept of the Golden Flow comes in. The Golden Flow represents the end-to-end lifecycle of forms, transactions, data, and user touchpoints, essentially capturing the full soup-to-nuts journey of business activity within your ERP system.

This framework is derived from hundreds of real-world customer journeys across industries like agency, media, and professional services. It ensures we’re always starting with best-practice coverage of core processes.

Why does this matter?

• It ensures the completeness of both the Sales-to-Cash and Operations-to-Payment
• It validates your business model at go-live and adapts as you grow.
• And it provides a scalable backbone for long-term financial and operational efficiency.

Now that we’ve introduced the Golden Flow as a framework, let’s take a look at what it looks like in action.

We like to visualize this as a standardized data highway. A visualization of core ERP processes such as Order-to-Cash, Procure-to-Pay, Work Codes, A/P, and Time tracking that stays consistent across implementations.

What makes this powerful is the flexibility to accommodate business-specific needs through what we call on-ramps and off-ramps. These represent entry and exit points that can be tailored based on industry or client-specific operations.

For example:

• In an agency, an on-ramp might be importing project-based budgets from an external planning tool.
• For a media company, it could involve integrating campaign performance metrics into project actuals.
• Off-ramps might include customized outputs like bank files, consolidated utilization reports, or even BI dashboards.

On the right side of the slide, you can see how this flow maps to actual system objects and transactional records. These include estimates, budgets, purchase orders, item fulfillment, job costing, invoicing, and payments, all interconnected.

Every client’s path is unique, but the structure we implement is repeatable, scalable, and rooted in proven procedures. That’s what allows us to move fast without compromising on flexibility or control.

Here’s a very typical business process map that we deliver to agency-type organizations.

As we pan through this end-to-end process flow, you’ll see how a modern agency operates across sales, delivery, resource planning, and financial management.

At the top, everything begins in Salesforce, where leads are qualified and opportunities are tracked through to contract and proposal. From there, the workflow shifts into project scoping and estimation, which feeds into delivery planning in our PSA system.

For project management, we leverage Certinia, a best-in-class PSA that provides a familiar and powerful experience for project managers, with features like task scheduling, resource planning, and utilization reporting, all designed with delivery teams in mind.

This allows us to maintain seamless continuity as we move into resource allocation, time tracking, and billing events, with NetSuite serving as the robust financial engine in the background.

By integrating Certinia with NetSuite, we’re not replacing NetSuite’s project infrastructure, we’re enhancing it with the strengths of each system:

• Certinia for intuitive project planning and execution
• NetSuite for project-based budgeting, accounting, billing, and financial consolidation

This hybrid architecture allows us to deliver an optimized, end-to-end solution that works across departments from sales to delivery to finance, all on a single, connected framework.

Wondering how this might look depending on your project billing type?

Fixed fee is a project billing method where the client is invoiced a fixed amount on a recurring monthly basis, regardless of the actual time or expenses incurred. This model ensures predictable revenue and billing, typically used for ongoing services or retainers.

Key Characteristics:

• Pre-agreed budget and fixed timeline.
• Invoicing is done monthly, on a predefined schedule (e.g., 1st of the month, month-end).
• Time and expense tracking is usually still done internally for margin analysis or reporting, but it does not affect billing.
• Revenue recognition is typically:
• Straight-line over the contract period, aligned with the monthly billing schedule
• Project Progress, Percentage of completion

This flow chart displays the golden flow for a fixed fee use case when it comes to agencies utilizing an external PSA tool.

Mielstone or Progress billing is a project billing method where a fixed total prices is agreed upon at the start, and invoicing is triggered only when a specific project milestone is completed

Key Characteristics

• Pre-defined milestone with Invoice and Estimated Cost amount tied per project phase.
• Invoicing based on milestone completion.
• Revenue recognition may vary but usually recognized on percentage completion of the project.
• Common in service delivery, implementation and consulting projects.

The main difference here is that the Projects in Certinia have milestones attached to it. On each milestone, an invoice amount and cost budget are also defined. This is then carried over into NetSuite as Projects and Project Milestones.

There are a lot of tools out there, but few solutions combine flexibility, financial thoroughness, and scalability like this one. The NetSuite and Certinia integration offers the best of both worlds:

• Certinia gives your delivery teams a robust PSA for planning, scheduling, and time tracking.
• NetSuite anchors your financial operations with powerful accounting, billing, and reporting tools.

Appficiency’s solution bridges the two, adding visibility, structure, and efficiency tailored to your business model.