IOWA CITY, IA - November 14, 2003. Today MetaCommunications, Inc. announced a major upgrade to its Job Manager production management system for creative, publishing, and prepress. The new Job Manager 3.5 release includes over 20 new features and the addition of the industry’s most powerful billing system. Job Manager 3.5 now supports partial/incremental billing and costing, user defined billing policies, multiple customer invoicing, prepayment, detailed reporting, and export support to leading accounting packages. Job Manager 3.5 will begin shipping December 1st, 2003. "The Job Manager 3.5 release strengthens our products’ billing capabilities beyond our competitors and offers organizations with complex billing procedures the ability to easily and efficiently manage the process. In today’s market, advertising agencies, publishers, and creative organizations need to bill lengthy projects several times over the course of production. Job Manager 3.5 includes tools to make the invoicing and tracking of charges easy while maintaining the required accounting cost information," says Robert T. Long, Executive Vice President of MetaCommunications. "Combine this with Job Manager’s already powerful invoice distribution and integration capabilities, and you truly have a front-end business solution that serves the needs of the creative and production processes." NEW FEATURES IN JOB MANAGER 3.5 INCLUDE: * Partial billing that allows billing to occur at any point in the job production cycle * Invoice multiple customers or locations per job * Issue prepayment invoices for advances and retainers or to bill clients for deposit amounts to cover expenses that will be incurred for a job * Create adjustments or billing corrections with efficient transfer and integration into accounting * Safeguard against overbilling/underbilling by marking what should/should not be billed for a job on a given invoice * Monitor and review what is being billed, what has been billed, and what remains to be billed for a job throughout the creative and production process * Enhanced Work-In-Process reports include the amount invoiced to date for jobs, providing greater control over jobs