City Media — out-of-home advertising operations

The challenge

A billboard agency lives or dies by its inventory. Every panel is two things at once — an asset to sell and a piece of rented ground to pay for — and each one has to move cleanly from available to sold to invoiced. City Media was running all of that across scattered spreadsheets, and turning a sold panel into a correct invoice took days.

The stakes then rose: Romania made ANAF e-Factura mandatory, so every invoice now has to be filed electronically with the tax authority, in a strict format, with exactly the right VAT and local taxes. Manual invoicing was no longer just slow — it was a compliance risk.

What we built

One connected system on Podio that runs City Media’s entire revenue cycle off a single asset: the panel. Inventory, offers, contracts, bookings, invoicing and tax submission all live in the same place and flow into one another — backed by a layer of custom integrations that handle the parts Podio can’t do on its own.

How it fits together

The panel is the spine of the system, and everything hangs off it:

• Inventory, two ways. Every billboard is recorded both as a sellable asset — location, size, format, pricing — and as a lease card that tracks what City Media pays the site owner, including the electricity contract behind each lit panel.
• From offer to invoice in one chain. Client → contract → offer → a per-panel ticket for each booking and period → invoice → line items. Each step pulls its data from the previous one, so a sold panel becomes an invoice without anyone re-typing anything.
• Money in two currencies. Pricing is handled in both RON and EUR, using the official National Bank of Romania (BNR) exchange rate, pulled in automatically.
• Beyond the sale. Connected modules track lease payments owed to land owners, the field-service lifecycle of the physical panels (siting, permits, construction, inspections and repairs), and the production jobs that print, mount and remove artwork.

Automation doing the heavy lifting

Under the hood, 100+ automated workflows and custom integrations take the manual, error-prone work off people’s hands:

• Invoices filed straight to ANAF. The system builds legally-compliant e-Factura (UBL) invoices and submits them to Romania’s national e-invoicing platform under the company’s VAT number — with a dry-run simulation, standard issuance and storno (credit-note) reversals. A scheduled job then reconciles each invoice’s status and files the official ANAF response back against it.
• Rent calculated to the day. For day-rate bookings, the system works out pro-rata rent across calendar months — handling partial first months and different month lengths — and converts EUR to RON at the exchange rate on the billing day.
• The right VAT, every time. Invoices are issued at the correct Romanian VAT rate, with the local advertising tax (TLP) added automatically as its own line.
• One-click documents. Offers, contract annexes and reservation confirmations are generated as ready-to-send files, complete with per-panel maps, photos and full pricing.
• Panels that manage themselves. Bookings activate when their period starts and close when it ends, and decoration / neutralization work orders fire automatically three days ahead.
• Nothing slips through. Escalating reminder ladders chase every contract — rental and electricity alike — assigning tasks to the right person at set intervals before each expiry.

A visual planner for every panel

A spreadsheet can tell you a panel is booked; it can’t show you when. So alongside the CRM we built City Media a custom visual planning board — a drag-and-drop scheduler where every panel is a row and every booking is a colour-coded block on a timeline. The team sees at a glance what’s free, reserved or sold, and can plan campaigns months ahead without ever double-booking a panel.

The board is a purpose-built web app that stays two-way in sync with the Podio CRM: panels and bookings appear on it automatically, changes made on the board flow back to Podio, and each block is colour-coded by its sales stage (offered → reserved → sold). Built-in safeguards reject conflicting edits and won’t let anyone remove a panel that still has live bookings — so the plan and the CRM never drift apart.

Built for the whole business

The system reaches well past the core CRM: around 30 interlinked apps across five Podio workspaces, spanning sales, field service and back-office finance — and a second sales channel for transit and street media that reuses the very same model.

By the numbers

A snapshot of what the system carries after years in daily use:

• ~290 billboard panels under management, each with its own location, pricing, lease and lifecycle.
• 2,500+ contacts — clients, suppliers and site owners — in a single shared database.
• 5,000+ offers built and 500+ contracts generated straight from the pipeline.
• 5,700+ invoices issued, off the back of 32,000+ automatically-calculated line items.
• 8,200+ per-panel bookings tracked from reservation through to finalization.

The result

Every panel, offer and contract now lives in one place, and invoicing that used to take days happens in minutes. Each invoice lands at ANAF in exactly the right format, with VAT, local tax and currency conversion handled automatically — compliant by default, not by effort. All told, the system saves the team an estimated 500+ hours of manual work every month.