Planning a theatrical release means managing real marketing spend across many channels, vendors, and markets while budgets continue to change. In practice, campaign planning, budget control, purchase order creation, and spend reconciliation were handled across separate systems and workflows, making it difficult to keep planned and actual spend aligned.
Penny was built to bring these steps into one multi-tenant platform. Marketing teams can plan budgets by title, market, channel, and line item, generate purchase orders from approved planning entries, and reconcile planned spend with imported actual results. By connecting directly to existing title, vendor, and procurement systems, Penny creates one structured source of truth for theatrical marketing spend across multiple markets.
A film release is a budget under pressure, spread across dozens of marketing channels and three separate markets, each with its own team and its own spreadsheet. Every campaign plan had to be broken down channel by channel, translated by hand into purchase orders inside external procurement systems, and then - weeks later - reconciled against what was actually spent. None of that data lived in one place: title metadata belonged to one system, approved vendor lists to another, and procurement status to a third, so plans, orders and actuals drifted apart the moment they were written down.
The manual hand-off between planning and procurement was the sharpest pain point. A planner would size a line item, then re-key it into iCampaign or MAPS as a purchase order - a step that introduced typos in vendor names, mismatched amounts, and orders that silently fell out of sync with the plan that generated them. Because reconciliation happened only periodically and by hand, budget overruns typically surfaced after the money was already committed, not while there was still room to course-correct. Multiply that across three markets with no shared system of record, and finance had no reliable, real-time answer to a basic question: what have we actually committed to spend, right now, against what we planned?
The team didn't need another spreadsheet template. It needed a system where the plan, the purchase order, and the actual spend were three views of the same underlying data - always current, in every market.
Penny is a multi-tenant marketing planning and budgeting platform that carries a theatrical campaign from first plan to reconciled spend. Campaigns are built channel by channel into structured budgets, and plan line items flow straight into purchase orders submitted to the connected procurement systems - closing the gap that used to mean re-keying numbers by hand. Title and vendor data sync in from the surrounding systems of record, so planners always work against live, authoritative data instead of stale copies.
The integration layer runs asynchronously and idempotently: every plan, budget, and purchase-order change is saved the moment it's made, and if a downstream system is briefly unavailable, the queue simply catches up once it's back - nothing lost, nothing duplicated. A reconciliation engine then tracks planned spend against actual as results come in, alongside the contractual terms negotiated with each cinema chain, so budget, procurement, and commercial context all live in one place.
Campaigns are built from budgets and line-item entries broken down by title, market, channel and commercial terms. This gives teams a clear planning structure instead of a single budget number, and keeps the financial logic of each campaign transparent from the start.
Penny turns plan line items into purchase orders and submits them to external procurement systems (iCampaign and MAPS), then tracks them through to result import. The plan and the procurement system stay connected, instead of being re-keyed by hand and quietly diverging.
The number that matters most isn't what you planned — it's the gap between plan and reality. Penny reconciles planned against actual spend, so teams see overruns and headroom while there's still time to act, not in a post-mortem.
One platform, cleanly isolated per market (DE/CH/AT), so each team plans in its own space while the business gets a consistent system of record across all three.
Every external touchpoint — PO submission to procurement systems, result imports from S3, title and vendor master data imports, report generation — runs on durable, scheduled queues. If a downstream system is briefly unavailable, the jobs are idempotent and simply catch up or re-run on the next pass. Nothing is lost, nothing is double-submitted.
Penny replaced scattered, market-specific spreadsheets with a single system of record for theatrical marketing spend across three markets. Plans are structured by channel, purchase orders flow straight into procurement systems and back, and planned-vs-actual spend is visible continuously instead of being reconstructed after the fact.
Because the integration layer is asynchronous and idempotent, an outage never corrupts the books or duplicates an order - delayed jobs simply catch up once service is restored. Titles and vendors stay current automatically, removing a whole class of manual-list errors. The net effect: less time reconciling tools and chasing numbers, more time deciding where the marketing budget should actually go.