Are you a finance expert? If you are, you are conversant with the financial reporting process of your business.
Finance groups in the advertising and marketing agencies can encounter overwhelming tasks when it comes to; drawing information from different sources to develop a vast range of reports for concerned parties. Preparing, verifying, and distributing the reports can take up most of your time.
Continuous Reporting Cycle
Often, this continuous reporting cycle can be likened to administrative tasks, and it hardly allows you to establish whether the reports are ideal for your business. As an entrepreneur, you can collaborate with a financial advertising agency to guarantee accuracy of the reports.
Further, you can adopt the following key strategies. These will help advance from; receiving reports from your team to becoming an established financial leader steering the company towards development and efficiency.
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Observe the Right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Many times, the different multipliers, rations, and other financial metrics are either; introduced by a new employee, or inherited from former leaders. This doesn’t mean that you aren’t working with the perfect indicators.
Remember, your indicators should be actionable and measurable for you to proceed with running them. Not only should you present a report of your profits to the financial advertising agency, but you should also incorporate modified gross income in your computation.
While usage is a key indicator, entrepreneurs should ensure that they are computing their billable time against the number of hours worked within the same period.
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Hold Routine Project Review Meetings
Hold meetings with your team of project managers, account managers, and client owners at least once weekly. Have a member from the financial advertising agency or the leadership attend the meeting as well.
Ensure the project manager has unrestricted access to the reports analyzed in the meetings to avoid surprises. The main objective of these meetings should be to evaluate the financial status of the project. Don’t make them a playing ground to bring down the project manager, especially if the project is not doing well.
Give them liberty to express their thoughts about the status of the project. Intimidating them can worsen the project. The objective here should be to find solutions before the situation can become uncontrollable.
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Get the Appropriate Reports from the Appropriate People
What procedure do your project managers use to regulate their project financial status? If they do it by manually reviewing invoices, chances are you aren’t getting the correct reports. Project managers require a real time financial status which they can review at least weekly.
If expenses and time goes overboard, noticing it early saves the company from major loses. In the case of your production staff, establish a way to match their target usage with their achieved usage.
This will help them set goals and follow their progress as they feed their timesheets. This is a simple adequacy tactic. However, having incentives linked to usage makes it an effective tool for facilitating high usage rates and fast timesheet entry.
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Obtain Buy-in from the Team
This can be hard, especially if the team has been around for quite some time. Getting them to adopt a new concept can be an arduous task; to encourage adoption, you want to ensure that each member contributes to the report.
Evaluate their feedback and ensure each of them is conversant with the motive of the report. Consider incorporating examples of the impact of the report in averting a past hurdle. Remember, obtaining a buy-in can only succeed if every team member clearly understands the status of the report
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Reports to Facilitate Critical Decision Support
You and your executive team have to handle crucial financial decisions regularly. Without the right data; you could end up opening a new service line without sufficient cash to support it, or you may be staring at a project that you can’t afford to staff.
Again, perhaps you know your cash balance. Do you know what the condition of your cash position will be in subsequent months? Determining your daily sales outstanding (DSO) is critical in eliminating red flags.
DSO is a simple computation of your annual revenue. DSO is the ultimate measurable you can use to gauge your progress and this makes it the best measurable.
Finally
Financial reporting plays a major role in the running of a successful agency. You can use these key strategies to evaluate your existing processes and establish the best way to enhance them. So, look out for worthy venture capital reporting system to ease out your efforts and make your management and reporting comfortable.
