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Do you think that all the work is done after the paper is published each day? Not in the Accounting department! Even before they prepare and send out the bills, they do the laborious process that is called “paper checking”. Someone there takes copies of the paper and a billing manifest and compares the two for exceptions. These might be ads that are missing, unordered, missized, misplaced, misprinted, etc. These error conditions are greatly reduced by using a tool like Layout-8000™. However what Layout designs might not end up being what’s published. One source of conflicts is that ads can be moved, inserted or deleted during news pagination. Another source of conflicts might be loss of color on an ad ordered as color. Of course ads sold for premium positions that aren’t satisfied are other candidates for makegoods.

Thorough paper checking at a mid market daily newspaper may be a task for one or more full time equivalents (FTEs), but with PaperCheckAdBoss (PCAB) this can be reduced to about 15 minutes (a few minutes of computer processing and about ten minutes of reviewing the results). Going from order entry, through dummying and pagination have well understood and perfected data and work flows. You go from front to back. But paper checking is about auditing. Auditing goes from back to front, verifying each step. Disparate data sources and staff activities must be validated. If the steps don’t run well in reverse, then the verification process becomes a labor intensive and error prone task. It can be a real mess. It is complicated by the cross departmental nature of the task. It is exacerbated by the requirements to produce accurate position manifests for tearsheet systems.

PaperCheckAdBoss (PCAB) is a module that gathers all the data that might be involved in paper checking and presents it in a graphical form that communicates the verification issues at a glance. PCAB can check EACH major step of the production process - Order Entry, Ad Makeup, Ad Dummying and Pagination

Final ad locations can come from a file (preferably in XML) produced by your pagination system; For InDesign® users with SCS’s InLay™ product or QuarkXpress® users with SCS/LinX™, we have tools to create this file. We also need the images of the pages as PostScript or PDF. The original ad insertion data comes from the Accounting department on electronic versions of the reports (sometimes more than one) used to do manual paper checking. Layout-8000 output files and finally, the ad images that were used in pagination, unify the paper checking process.

The types of ads that can be matched include Display ROP, Classified Display, Obituaries, Classified Liners, Ganged ads.

Matching an ad image or an ad on a page image to the accounting manifest is part of the heart of PCAB. It is often possible for the program to extract the advertiser name or phone number from the image. Whatever partial information is extracted can be enhanced by a user-maintained "dictionary" of terms which uniquely identify the advertiser and an account number. Even the individual pieces of ganged ads can usually be identified.

All of the gathered information about each ad, including the published size, is compared to the ad order as reflected on the accounting manifest. Pages as dummied are presented next to the final paginated pages for a rapid visual comparison - with NO MEASURING. Discrepancies between the paginated ads and the manifest are noted for additional follow-up. PCAB can currently detect 16 types of discrepancy in five categories: Missing Discrepancies, Zone and Page Discrepancies, Position Discrepancies, Size Discrepancies and Other Discrepancies.

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