Case Study – Advertising & Marketing Services Industry

Accounting Client

A top-tier global Advertising and PR agency – London office.

Accounting Problem

Braant were engaged to focus on three exact issues to resolve:

• Reduce WIP (work in progress on the balance sheet) – £1.5m in costs not recharged to clients.
• Reduce average debtor days from 82 days.
• Create brand new management pack for the board of directors.

Accounting Solution

With regard to WIP, it was apparent that a large proportion of expenses were not allocated to correct project codes, or not allocated at all. The billing team then had to spend hours chasing account managers for the correct project code to recharge to the client. 

We created a new project-code structure which was far easier to use by account managers and was maintained regularly to avoid old projects codes being used. We devised an intuitive dropdown, rule-based system to confirm that when a project code is selected, it is correct. We then deployed a team of billing clerks from within Braant’s team to work through the backlog of WIP.

Credit control was a focus where we allocated one of our Credit Controllers to work full-time on chasing debtors until debtor days dropped below 30. Thereafter we could maintain this with just a few hours work each week.

We met with the board of directors to discuss and understand exactly what they needed from their monthly management pack. We provided advice on what industry standard analytics were widely used such as productivity analysis, and client and project profitability reports.  

A comprehensive and holistic management pack was produced which was mostly automated from data extracted from SAP.