Out-of-Home Advertising Management Software

Most out-of-home media owners still run on spreadsheets, shared photo folders and message threads. Availability lives in one person’s head, the same face gets promised to two clients, proof photographs sit on a field executive’s phone, and invoices drift out of step with what was actually booked.

Sazinga AdBoard is purpose-built for media owners rather than a general-purpose CRM bent into shape. It takes a structure from vacant to a client proposal, a booked campaign, proof that it ran, and an invoice that gets paid — with one shared calendar underneath so the same face cannot be sold twice.

What this replaces

Four artefacts, usually: a master Excel sheet of sites, a second sheet of who is booked where, a PowerPoint deck rebuilt by hand for every enquiry, and a folder of WhatsApp photographs named IMG_20260812_094411.jpg. Each is maintained by a different person, and none of them can be asked a question.

The system replaces all four with one set of records, and the client-facing documents are generated from those records rather than typed alongside them.

How availability is actually decided

Availability is not a status column that somebody remembers to update. It is a query.

Every campaign line — a specific site, for a specific date window, at a specific rate — is its own row, and a new booking is tested against those rows with an interval-overlap check: an existing line blocks a new one when its start date is on or before the new end date and its end date is on or after the new start date. The check runs per site, scoped to your organisation, and only counts lines belonging to a campaign that is actually active. A draft, completed or cancelled campaign does not hold inventory hostage.

Digital screens are the exception, and they are handled explicitly rather than fudged. A site carries a slot capacity, and a digital site accepts overlapping bookings up to that number of concurrent slots, with each line recording which slot it occupies. A static hoarding has a capacity of one, and one is enforced.

The same check runs when a proposal line is priced, again when the proposal is converted to a campaign, and again when a single line is created or edited. A booking that was safe when it was quoted is re-tested before it is committed, because the intervening fortnight is exactly when somebody else sold it.

What a site record has to hold

A hoarding is not a row in a list. It is a structure with dimensions, a direction, a lighting condition and an ownership arrangement, and each of those changes what you can sell and what it is worth.

• Type — billboard, unipole, gantry, wall, digital or LED — plus a site code that is unique across the estate and stays on the proposal deck the client receives.
• Width and height in feet, and a separate area in square feet that is the figure you negotiated rather than a number the system multiplied out for you.
• Lighting held as front-lit, back-lit or non-lit, not as a yes/no flag, because a night photograph of a non-lit hoarding is a photograph of the dark and the system needs to know that.
• Ownership as owned or partnership, with third-party sites carrying the supplier they came from and partnership sites linked to the arrangement that shares their revenue.
• Coordinates, city, state and the office the site is administered from, so an operator across several cities has one estate rather than one system per branch.

How a rate becomes an invoice

The end rate on a campaign line is built rather than typed: base rate plus mounting charge, plus the printing charge unless printing is being handled by the client, rounded to paise. That figure is deliberately pre-tax. Nothing folds GST into a line rate, because a rate with tax already inside it cannot be re-taxed correctly when the invoice is raised under a different registration.

Tax is applied once, at the invoice: GST on the subtotal, TDS calculated on the subtotal rather than the taxed total, and a net amount that is what you should actually expect in the bank. An organisation with more than one GST registration issues under the right one, on the invoice.

Agency commission is not a discount on the client’s invoice. It is a separate downstream payout, computed from the billing attributed to that agent for a period, at the commission rate held against them and snapshotted at the moment of computation — so a rate change next quarter does not silently rewrite last quarter’s payout. Monthly commission and a year-end bonus are separate entries against the same agent.

Generating an invoice from a campaign requires two permissions at once, not one. Someone who may create and edit campaigns cannot, by that fact alone, bill them.

What proof of display means here

Proof of display is the photograph that shows the client’s artwork was up, on the right structure, on the right date. AdBoard treats it as a categorised record rather than an attachment: each photograph is filed as installation, mid-campaign monitoring, night, end-of-campaign or uninstallation, against the campaign it belongs to, carrying the coordinates and the time it was taken.

Location permission is requested before the position is read, not after, which sounds like housekeeping and is the difference between a geotagged proof set and several hundred photographs with no location on them at all.

What happens when the phone has no signal

The field app writes to disk first and goes to the network second. A capture is persisted to the device queue before any upload is attempted, so an app that is killed on the way back from the site has lost nothing.

The queue then drains one item at a time rather than in parallel, on the reasoning that a weak connection is a thin pipe and parallel uploads only compete for it. Each photograph tracks its own two states — uploaded, and attached to the record — and both are written to disk the instant the server confirms them, so a partial failure resumes where it stopped instead of re-sending everything. Failed items re-arm themselves up to five times when the app next comes to the foreground, and an item is marked done only when the device can prove from its own stored state that every photograph in it is attached. Not when a call failed to throw.

Where a report has been captured with no record on the server to attach it to, the record is created first and its identifier written to disk immediately, so a retry never creates it twice.

Who can see what

Access is built from 78 individual permissions, held as a registry in code rather than as rows somebody can edit into an inconsistent state. Roles are made by selecting from those permissions, a user’s effective access is the union of the roles they hold in the organisation they are working in, and six system roles ship as sensible starting points.

The built-in assistant resolves its permissions through the same engine that guards the REST API, and the tools it is even shown are filtered by that result. It cannot answer a question about records the person asking is not allowed to open.

What it does not do

It is not digital signage software. It does not push content to a screen, schedule playback or monitor whether a panel is alive. If your problem is getting the right video onto the right LED panel, this is the wrong category — the distinction is worth reading in full before you buy anything.

It is also built for the media owner, not the buyer. There is no agency-side planning, no cross-vendor media buying and no audience measurement or impression modelling. And there is no rate-card entity: default rates live on the site and are overridden per line, which suits negotiated selling and does not suit a business that publishes fixed public tariffs.

Where to go next

The outdoor media industry page covers the operating problems this was built against, and the out-of-home operator case study covers one estate’s move off spreadsheets. For the mechanics, see how it works, the feature detail and the vacancy cost calculator, which puts a number on what empty sites are costing you. Operators who also run vehicles or equipment on hire use the same booking model in Sazinga Rentals.