What to expect if you're a Marketing prospect or client...

At fist, we conduct a thorough vetting and discovery call that typically lasts ~45-minute (to 1+ hour), which is typically lead by our Head of Sales or our CEO & Founder. This introductory discovery call helps us learn and understand all of the internal processes and systems that your agency currently adheres to and utilizes, and we also get a better grasp of all key decision-makers, custom KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) and all internal or external operators and staff that help run and make-up your full team. While many companies seem to think that their processes are standardized or similar amongst their common industry peers, we've learned that EVERY business is different and that every organization has unique and nuanced ways of performing some of the same, industry-specific tasks, so we take our discovery calls quite seriously, as they help us get the scope of work as dialed-in and accurate as possible from the jump.

Given our experience with marketing & advertising businesses, we understand the various KPI's and industry models and can adapt our scope of work accordingly when tailoring our services and offerings around what a marketing client may need. We’re also quite proficient and familiar with the various technology software (and categories) commonly utilized in most marketing & advertising agencies, small and large. Time-tracking tools, project management systems (internal and external facing), payroll systems, expense management/tracking, CRMs, and bidding/invoicing products are just a few of the tech stack categories we discuss in our initial discovery and onboarding conversations, and we have helped many clients in this sector to optimize and choose better systems that meet their ever-evolving needs.

There’s an extensive list of terrific technology solutions, products, plug-ins & systems that integrate nicely with both Xero and Quickbooks Online, so if you’re shopping around for a new tool to meet any business need that is specific to your marketing, advertising, creative or production shop, or you simply aspire to remove a currently over-manual process into the 21st Century, we can always help you shop around to find the best solution for your specific business need. We often engage our marketing clients on a consulting basis to help them find the best technology solution for their business, and if there’s not a product or solution available on the market at that time, we can also entertain options of creative custom RPA (or automation) around their specific use-cases. Like anything, custom automation or process automation comes at a price, and it might not always be the cheapest option available, but in any custom configuration or automation bid, we’ll present the “pros and cons” and bid the job fairly to both parties. 

We also work with marketing businesses to help optimize or clean up any existing software configurations, and we make sure that your systems/data are always integrating nicely where/if necessary. Because of the various functions (CRM, WIP, AP/AR tools, Job-Tracking, Payroll, etc.) that affect your accounting & tax functions, we must ensure the data feeding your accounting system is clean, accurate, and reliable. Many old-school accountants won’t involve themselves in certain systems and processes that were commonly thought of as “more operational”, but we know that if it’s affecting the integrity of the accounting data we’re putting out, it should be a part of our scope of work and we’re never scared to get our hands dirty! 

We helped countless marketing & advertising/creative agency clients optimize and manage their Accounts Receivable processes/workloads, as well as Accounts Payable functions. We’ve even built proprietary AR workflows using RPA (robotic process automation) for clients with hundreds of non-recurring monthly invoices (which required tremendous manual manpower before our automation). Zapier is one of our favorite tools for building out custom RPA workflows, and we can always take on new automation projects upon request. 

For certain clients with heavy invoice volumes/transactions, complex AR/AP infrastructures, and vendor billing schedules, our automation has proven invaluable; sometimes saving upwards of 20-30 hours monthly on manual data entry. We love to get our clients set up & efficiently running Accounts Payable on tools like Bill.com. Bill.com integrates nicely with both Xero and QBO and in addition to eliminating some of the manual effort tied to paying hundreds of bills monthly, tools like Bill.com can further alleviate cashflow headaches that some of our clients face (and didn’t know there was a viable/cheap solution for). 

We can also support Marketing businesses with Strategic Technical Accounting & FP&A too - which oftentimes includes services like SKU rationalization studies, budgeting & forecasting, compensation planning, KPI measuring, detailed cashflow analysis, recapitalization & loan consolidation assistance.