How Taft Communications Optimized Their Financial Operations

Taft Communications is an award-winning communications consulting firm with over 35 years of implementing targeted campaigns for clients across the globe. Like many agencies, Taft Communications’ ultimate goal is to deliver the best creative product to their clients, but were overwhelmed with spreadsheets and integrating an excess amount of data to keep their agency operations running smoothly. As a result, this left their finance team with minimal time to focus on other key initiatives to support the growth of their agency.

Mark McNulty, Chief Financial Officer at Taft Communications, recently shared how he and his team were spending more time reconciling data from multiple systems than they did actually using it to analyze the agency’s KPIs. As Mark explains, “We had that classic example of multiple systems that we would try to integrate them and have them speak to each other sharing data. There was the constant uploading and downloading of information and trying to reconcile it. I had been through those types of environments and I know that's not a foundation to be successful.”

When marketing agency project management and finance systems are disconnected, the finance team is tasked with manual reconciliation and data entry to get what they need. Since timely financial and project forecasting has becoming increasingly important, agencies are in need of a system with robust controls so that key stakeholders can provide input and validate transactions.

Implement A Software Platform That Will Help Your Agency Grow

By leveraging Deltek’s WorkBook for their financial operations, it allowed Taft to be more flexible in the workflow and approval process, and ensured that the right people were looking at the transactions and validating them. It established more internal controls and provided more efficiency around cleaning the data and more time for resources to analyze the key performance indicators. With WorkBook, Taft Communications had the ability to establish approval workflows that allowed team members to take accountability for the financial data that they entered into the system. It delivered more accurate performance reports (more frequently) and allowed more valuable time at the end of the day for their staff.

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 particulate month.

One key step that Taft Communications executed before implementing an agency management system, was researching the right solution for their agency. It is critical to select the right software for your organization. Be sure it is one built for the agency industry specifically and addresses the core functionalities you are looking for in order to make strategic decisions for the future.