We continue in our series of posts on what makes Sage Intacct such a compelling solution for growing entertainment companies. For previous posts, click here. For future posts, you’ll just have to wait. ;-)
Our topic today is project accounting. For many of our film and TV clients, they’re tracking production costs in EP, Cast & Crew, or another industry standard. As a result, they don’t require formal project accounting in Sage Intacct as they simply import in summarized totals and keep the details in the production accounting solution. In those scenarios, we leverage the Sage Intacct project dimension to accumulate all revenue and costs in order to get detailed reports on film titles, TV seasons, film festivals, and more. Our clients gain visibility into project accounting details without all of the administrative overhead of a project accounting module.
We’ve got other clients, however, that require “full-blown” project accounting. They provide project-related professional services to their clients in the form of post-production work, marketing campaigns, visual and special effects, bonus features, and more.
Spoiler: whether a client needs the simplicity of a project dimension for tracking and reporting or the need to completely automate their professional services department, Sage Intacct provides an elegant solution. We covered dimensions in a previous blog post, so we’re going to focus on project accounting capabilities now.
Challenge
Project-centric organizations with dated or entry-level systems typically face numerous little challenges that add up to one big heaping mess of a problem.
- Systems that don’t integrate (either “all the way” or “at all”)
- Accounting
- Time entry
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- Employee expense management
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- Payroll
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- CRM
- Accounting processes that require a lot of manual work
- AR invoice creation and approval
- Revenue recognition
- PO / AP invoice approval
- Month-end close
- Reporting that relies on Excel
- Project profitability
- Budget vs. actuals
- Employee utilization and realization
These challenges tend to be manageable when a professional services organization is small. But as the company grows, the challenges grow with it and can quickly become a barrier to cost-effective growth, internal morale, and superior customer service.
Real-World Results
RKL client, Mob Scene, is an award-winning Hollywood marketing agency that creates bold and innovative advertising and promotions for the entertainment industry. The full-service firm produces trailers, creative content, digital and social campaigns, original programming, special shoots, and motion graphics for television networks, streaming services, major motion pictures, and brands. As a professional services organization, Mob Scene’s creative teams juggle 400 concurrent projects in any given month, and need to efficiently track and bill their time alongside project budgets and milestones.
Thanks to Sage Intacct’s integrated project accounting and time tracking workflows, the team went from dedicating around 90% of their time to administrative work down to only 40%, accelerated the financial close by 60%, and dramatically improved cash forecast accuracy.
Solution
Sage Intacct enables growing service organizations to move beyond their “one big heaping mess of a problem.” In other words, forget the pain of manual processes and patching together countless Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or QuickBooks instances. With Sage Intacct’s automated project accounting, your data can moves seamlessly across your growing entertainment company in easily customizable, unified workflows to manage projects and profitability. Track project costs, expedite time-and-expense processes, and accelerate project billing.
The screenshots below provides insight into what’s possible with Sage Intacct project accounting!
Figure 1: Real-time Project Data
Figure 2: CFO Dashboard
Figure 3: VP of Operations Dashboard
Conclusion
If you’d like to turn your “one heaping big mess” into a “streamlined, integrated, insightful solution of project accounting brilliance,” contact RKL today. We’re here to help!
