Are you ready to optimize agency finance with WorkBook?

The ultimate goal of your agency is to deliver the best creative product possible for your clients at all times. But the conundrum most agency leaders face is that they’re too busy wrangling spreadsheets and cobbling together data to keep agency operations running, there’s no time left to focus on those creative goals. That’s why it is so important that you take the necessary steps to optimize operations so that the agency runs smoothly behind the scenes and you can get back to what’s important.

When it comes to taking the necessary steps to LevelUp and mature as an agency, the changes you may need to make to your finance processes can seem a little daunting. Especially for small agencies that want to stay small, or agencies experiencing rapid growth. In either situation, it can be tough to decide how much to change and how quickly. 

Is your agency ready to make that call? Let’s find out.

If you’ve already accepted the fact that your agency has some work to do to get its operational house in order, then you are already familiar with the burden that puts on the Finance Team. When your agency’s project management and finance processes are disconnected, the Finance Team ends up shouldering a ton of follow-up, reconciliation, and data entry, just to get what they need to begin their daily duties. Implementing industry best practices is the best place to start, but without a tool that captures that data at every step and feeds it through to the Finance Team, there’s always going to be some level of inefficiency, risk and manual work involved. That’s why it is important to integrate your agency’s front-end operations at the very least. When the same data is being shared throughout the CRM, project management and resource planning processes, the Finance Team can be confident that the resulting data they get to do their job is accurate. The next step is to decide if you’re ready to connect your finance processes into the same system and utilize a fully integrated solution to ensure that data is secure and fully controlled from end-to-end.

You’re ready to upgrade to WorkBook’s finance module if:

• You want more granular reports to evaluate financial performance at the job, task or resource level.
• You bill for time and materials and need to see all job level transactions when creating an invoice and selecting what to bill each period.
• You want to establish internal controls that allow other team members to verify and provide you with accurate financial data such as:
1. Empowering the Account Services Team to be accountable for verifying the expected revenue of their opportunities to give you a more accurate Net Revenue Forecast.
2. Empowering the Project Management Team to be accountable for controlling project costs, including creating invoices and purchase orders to give you a more accurate cash flow forecast.
3. Empowering the Project Management Team to be accountable for verifying job progress so you can adjust WIP and recognize revenue accurately.

Case in point: as CFO of Taft Communications, Mark S. McNulty was spending more time reconciling data from multiple systems than he did actually using it to analyze the agency’s KPIs. And because timely forecasting had become increasingly important, he needed a system with robust controls so that key stakeholders could provide input and validate transactions before they were posted.

Mark knew his agency was ready to LevelUp and integrate agency operations to include finance. Now, he’s established approval workflows within WorkBook that allow team members to take accountability for the financial data they put into the system, which allows him to pull accurate performance reports more frequently and gives him back valuable time at the end of the day.

“By the time I get to the month-end and am looking at the financials, I spend very little time scrubbing the numbers, because I know fundamentally they're sound, which allows me to focus on analyzing the various key performance indicators, in that particular month.”

Mark S. McNulty, CFO, Taft Communications

You may not be ready if:

• Your Finance Team doesn’t yet have the acumen to manage the entire financial management process in-house.
• You simply don’t have the appetite to change or interrupt your current financial workflow.

It’s ok if your agency isn’t ready to let go of a legacy or entry-level accounting tool. Deltek WorkBook is built to support your journey of continuous improvement at your own pace. You can always add the finance module later when you’re ready. Until then, our partner SmartSoftware offers a supplementary product that allows you to connect WorkBook to either Xero or QuickBooks.

With these WorkBook Connectors, your agency can keep its existing financial management workflow and:

Concentrate on agency-wide adoption of WorkBook’s best practices that will provide the Finance Team better data.

Streamline front-office operations by replacing disparate tools for CRM, project management, collaboration and resource planning.

Take your time to refine financial processes to the point when you are ready to integrate them into your agency management system.

Let’s face it – when making decisions about your key business systems, its counterproductive to implement band-aid solutions when you’ll likely have to change again at some point in the future. So its important to take the time to evaluate your agency’s processes and your goals for the future, and then choose a solution that will scale with you as you grow.