November 10, 2020 – Accountability, a leading financial management platform for marketing and advertising agencies, launched an interactive dashboard for agency financial leaders to assess their company’s financial position.
The global pandemic brought a new level of scrutiny on the agency and its operations. Anyone at the agency with financial responsibilities demands real-time access to consolidated data to inform decisions on project costing and resourcing.
All ERP systems have reporting capabilities that promise to give agencies visibility into profitability and revenue, but many of these platforms were not built for professional services and more imporantly, the marketing and advertising vertical. This means that onerous tasks specific to running an agency project are still managed in disparate places. “Accountability is specifically for this vertical and serves as the foundation for an agency’s financial operations, ” said Terry McMillan, CEO and Founder of Accountability. ” This is a crucial differentiator for our dashboard because the agency CFO can drill down into specific transactions without leaving our platform. “
This product launch features a redesigned version of Accountability’s dashboard, which gives the agency CFO an on-demand view of its financial position. “Instead of using a third-party visualization package, we built a tile-based dashboard structure that is completely customizable for each user of the platform. We have all of the transactions in our platform to easily show different dissections of data for the agency, including Job WIP Balances and WIP Aging. This launch includes pre-determined charts across different categories — Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss, Revenue, Jobs, Resources, and Time. Agencies can also create custom charts for Balance Sheet data and publish predefined dashboards for different teams within the organization. They’ll be able to create custom charts for the other categories in subsequent releases.”
The Accountability platform was designed by former agency CFOs to address the agency’s nuanced needs. “We built what we wish we had when we were agency CFOs,” said Terry McMillan who’s also the platform’s Chief Architect. “It gives the financial leader at the agency a holistic view of the business so that all decisions are data-informed. More importantly, KPIs can be dissected at various levels down to the actual agency job, so it holds the entire agency accountable and more connected.” Ben Keep, Chief Operating Officer of creative agency, Emotive is an early adopter of the redesigned dashboard. “My role requires me to have an accurate and up-to-date view of how my agency is operating. The insight I can extract from Accountability’s dashboard informs my decision-making and quickly identifies areas of the business that I need to prioritize. “ Terry McMillan adds, “It’s a big time-saver. Anyone with access can create an ad hoc dashboard for their leadership or board meeting and publish it to attendees beforehand instead of spending hours putting together a deck and taking up valuable time walking through slides. We use the Accountability platform and dashboard ourselves and our board meetings are 50% shorter but 2x more effective. What’s great is that if anyone has a question about the numbers, they can get to the transaction that makes up that number without leaving the platform.”
