Overview

Red Door Interactive is a rapidly expanding marketing and advertising agency that’s known for our data-driven approach to driving brand awareness, improving customer experiences, increasing leads, and growing loyalty and advocacy. As a full-service marketing agency, our entire business revolves around quantifying the time employees spend on client projects. We help to optimize brand and performance marketing across all channels -- paid, earned, and owned. Beyond our tactical capabilities, Red Door’s approach to client engagements allows us to solve enterprise marketers’ biggest challenges around stakeholder alignment, cross-department silos, resourcing, and measurement.

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

As our company grew and headcount management needs increased, the budgeting process became cumbersome. We were trying to manually manage it with hundreds of tabs across 6-7 different Excel workbooks that we would then route to all department managers to update their budget requests. Scenario planning had become hugely time-consuming, and budgets often weren’t approved until weeks after a new period started.

We also struggled with legacy accounting software that didn’t integrate with our financial reporting, project management, expenses, payroll, or CRM systems. This meant that we constantly wasted time on duplicate data entry and error-prone invoicing. And without having access to timely, accurate information, our management was too often playing guessing games on vital questions. It was nearly impossible to make plans or execute on strategic decision-making.

The Solution

Our main goals were to improve the efficiency, accuracy, and visibility of our complex time tracking, revenue recognition, and headcount budgeting processes so that we could make better-informed decisions. We also wanted to gain insight into revenue and costs by utilizing a multi-dimensional reporting structure. We implemented the Sage Intacct financial management solution, which seamlessly integrated with other applications we were already using for expense reports, A/P processing, and data visualization. The modern solution provided automation that streamlined all of our financial processes—including new project creation, expense report processing, invoicing, revenue recognition based on percent completion, accounts payables, and reporting. We also replaced our tedious quarterly budget and re-forecasting cycles with Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning. We got up-and-running quickly, and effortlessly mapped our entire budget structure to our general ledger accounts.

The results

Information visibility has been one of our biggest gains. We now have the ability to apply descriptive tags to each transaction—such as the relevant project, client, office location, employee, or vendor. This delivers invaluable operational insight because we can organize all of our financial and budget data across any of these dimensions. For example, we can break down our revenue across multiple service lines, including search engine optimization, analytics, social media, or web development, and we can report on financials by project type, customer type, or media buys.

Our department managers are responsible for their own team’s budgets, so having personalized real-time dashboards with key data in Sage Intacct has been critical. This transparency helps us hold managers accountable, since we’ve started tying their incentive plans to their budgets. Now that they have visibility into how all spending impacts their team’s profitability, they’re better at managing costs and can make decisions more proactively.

Robust reporting has created a waterfall effect across our business. Since we can get budgets approved quicker, managers make decisions faster, and get employees on the right projects at the right times. We can identify high and low-performing months faster, and react more quickly to focus on what we need to do to expand new business in certain target markets, or grow existing clients through other service offerings.

Metrics

Overall, we improved profitability by 6%, while improving budgeting efficiency by 85%. Across the board, Sage Intacct has also helped our finance team slash data entry and data management tasks that used to take us hours or days down to just minutes. In particular, switching to a modern financial solution changed our budget creation process from a headache that took at least two full days every quarter, to a simple two-hour task every six months. 

We now can more accurately monitor headcount dynamics; for example, we can easily run complex calculations and models to understand the potential impact of changing salaries or start dates. Since we can create forecasts for leadership in less than half the time, we can run more scenarios, giving a more nuanced look at the business. With the additional time we’re saving, we can then distribute final budgets a week before the period starts, rather than after the fact. 

With Sage Intacct’s easy-to-integrate financial technology, we’ve also gained intuitive workflows that helped boost our overall finance team productivity by 33%, while increasing invoice accuracy for our clients. We’ve reduced processing time for accounts payable by 83%, and have saved 55 hours on monthly workflows and reporting. With all of these efficiencies, we shifted the focus of our two-person team from day-to-day transactional work to higher-level financial management and strategy.

The Technology

• Sage Intacct, including core financials, dashboards and reporting, and budgeting and planning
• Sage Intacct also shares data or integrations with:
  • Abacus for expense reports
  • Emburse for employee cards
  • Stampli for A/P processing
  • Tableau and Domo for advanced data visualizations

Disruptive Factor

Our project to overhaul our approach to budgeting and planning was definitely game-changing, with an impact that’s been felt across our entire organization. One of the biggest areas of improvement has been in the data visibility and analytics we now have with Sage Intacct’s customizable dashboards. In our old system, dimensional reporting was nearly impossible and required considerable manual work. Now, we can slice and dice our data with the click of a button and provide robust reporting. 

The net effect of this is that we have access to real-time insights that support both tactical and strategic planning. We now have new visibility to support project capacity planning, monitor projects with up-to-date information, and better forecast our budgeting needs. This increased transparency into the financial health of our organization has made an incredible difference.

Shining Moment

The budgeting process previously involved entering data, adjusting, and creating 5 different Excel worksheets with 20 department and office location tabs. We were spending more time on collecting and validating data than we were on scenario planning and forecasting tasks. By automating this work we eased our budgeting workload by 85%. This gave us more time to focus on those high-value tasks, bringing much-needed modeling to better inform our business decisions.