The Right Accounting Partner Can Eliminate Data Bottlenecks, Giving You Clear Visibility to Navigate Your Growth Path

Could you imagine setting out to sail across the ocean without a compass? Managing a growing marketing agency without accurate, complete, and timely financial reporting is kind of the same thing–at least in terms of the likelihood you’ll find yourself off-course.

Our team helped a growing agency scale to the next level by improving reporting capabilities, giving principals a clear view of the business to support key decision-making and strategy execution.

Achieving Growth at Scale

Growing a marketing agency involves dozens of decisions both big and small. Decisions like whether to hone in on a specialty or diversify, how to leverage pricing strategies to maximize profits, and when to grow your team.

Every single one of these decisions begins with accounting and finance. In order to achieve and sustain growth, agencies need strategic planning, operational efficiency, and strong financial management.

A growing marketing agency was ready to scale to the next level but felt they’d surpassed the capacity of their existing accounting infrastructure to support additional growth. They needed help establishing the team, technologies, and policies that would accelerate–not hinder–their potential as an organization..

They recognized the benefits of a team approach that could provide talent and expertise on multiple levels ranging from daily accounting activities to systems design and financial planning.

Outsourcing Finance and Accounting as a Solution

As businesses scale, the intricacy and volume of tasks grow exponentially which can compound process problems–eating up a lot of time. As a result of growth, principal’s frequently find themselves entrenched in day-to-day operations, consequently sidelining high-value strategic initiatives.

The team at kept.pro offered a solution that would address both the aspects of financial insufficiency that were inhibiting the agency’s growth and an opportunity to free up more principal time to focus on achieving new growth.

More than one-third of rapidly growing businesses are utilizing outsourcing partnerships to scale their businesses. In these scenarios, outsourcing partners like kept.pro bring a combination of expertise, tools, and best practices that work hand-in-hand to elevate the quality of work alongside the quantity of work.

Our team initially assessed the company’s financial systems and then began work to consolidate accounting and operations platforms to a single system. Some of the most immediate benefits of this consolidation included greater efficiency, better reporting quality and a reduction of reporting latency.

In other words, the agency had better information to inform key decision making, allowing them to act quickly and strategically.

Outsourcing Accounting to Support Growth

Let’s take a closer look at exactly how the team at kept.pro helped this agency scale growth. First, we converted the agency from a cash accounting system to an accrual accounting system. This fundamental change would provide visibility into profitability that would make strategic financial planning and analysis possible.

We also consolidated technology to a single accounting platform for simplicity, and we documented processes and established controls to create consistency. These activities worked together to create a system that would produce similar, repeatable results regardless of who was handling the daily accounting work.

Our team provided a variety of additional support services designed to help the agency use the new systems we had put into place. This support included:

• Providing training for internal staff.
• Collecting overdue accounts to improve cash flow management.
• Correcting data structures for simplicity and clarity.
• Delivering ongoing accounting services.

Deep Technology and Accounting Expertise Enables Sustainable Growth

Reporting capabilities dramatically and immediately improved. For example, the agency had previously relied on platform ‘defaults’ with a lot of ad hoc changes made by different employees over the course of many years. As a result, they had a lot of reporting that didn’t really tell them anything useful.

Using industry, technology and accounting best practices, kept.pro transformed the agency’s data structure to provide a clear view of profitability across projects and clients by:

• Editing the Chart of Accounts.
• Configuring a “Class” or Department schema.
• Utilizing Native Service and Customer Data Features.

This data, paired with accurate, complete, and timely financial reporting improved decision-making, allowing the agency to pursue growth opportunities with confidence.

Consider a Team Approach

At kept.pro, we take a team approach to solving your biggest finance challenges. From architecting effective systems and processes to maintaining daily accounting operations, we can provide tailored outsourcing solutions designed to support and grow your business.

Contact our team today to learn more.