Element Streamlined Project Management and Enhanced Financial Visibility with Workamajig

Element is a holistic marketing agency that blends advertising, integrated marketing, and digital services with a down to earth culture and honest communication.

quick HIGHLIGHTS

CHALLENGES

SOLUTION     
Workamajig End-to-End Solution

• Project Management to create, estimate, schedule, and deliver projects on time and on budget
• Time Tracking keeps projects profitable and on schedule
• Finance & Accounting to improve margins through better reporting
• Business Intelligence connects projects to profits, enabling accurate forecasting
• Sales CRM captures new opportunities automatically

RESULTS

Challenges:

GAINING HOLISTIC PROJECT MANAGEMENT
AND BUSINESS INSIGHTS

Element needed a solution to help streamline project management and connect creative project insights to business finances.

For years, the agency used a non-integrated solution for project management — a combination of Trello to assign tasks and track project lifespans, plus a homebrew tool built specifically for time tracking and budgeting. They also had separate systems for finances, PO tracking, customer relationship management, and more.

A lack of integration between these different systems meant that Element didn’t have the big-picture business intelligence necessary to make strategic decisions. They needed a way to unify all of their disparate data in one place.

Nikki Peroutka, Director of Operations at Element, explains:

“As we’ve grown, we’ve piecemealed our software solutions to fit our needs at the time. Time tracking, budgets, finances, CRM — it was in separate systems. We didn’t have a lot of end-to-end transparency because everything was disconnected. We weren’t able to generate the reports that would allow us to make strategic business decisions.”

Over time, the disconnected systems also added extra labor to various workflows and added uncertainty to business insights. For example, if Nikki wanted to gauge project profitability of a specific service offering, she had to consult the General Ledger accounts which were divided up by service.

“We didn’t have a lot of end-to-end transparency because everything was really disconnected. We weren’t able to generate the reports that would allow us to make strategic business decisions.”

SOLUTION:

PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND BUSINESS

Nikki demoed over a dozen project management tools, but none were the right fit for Element. It wasn’t until she tried Workamajig that she found the perfect solution.

''The Workamajig demo was a slam dunk. Other demos walked me through generic project workflows designed for multiple types of businesses, but Workamajig was clearly built with agencies in mind. It was immediately apparent that this was the answer to every challenge we’d been facing,” Nikki says.

To ease adoption, Element decided to roll out Workamajig in phases. They started by streamlining project management workflows.

Workamajig’s all-in-one project management software centralizes project information, including tasks, calendars, budgets, project timelines, notifications, and more. Workamajig automatically monitors active projects and distills need-to-know information into daily activity feeds, which update in real-time. These feeds deliver insight into project health, including when budgets or timelines are at risk. Project Managers can also customize project reports within Workamajig and export those reports with the click of a button.

 ''Workamajig’s automation is now doing a lot of the heavy lifting for us. We’re creating efficiencies from that standpoint. Another big benefit is that everything is centralized — our entire team has one point of truth,” Nikki says.

Element also retired its home-baked time tracking system in favor of Workamajig’s creative dashboard, which includes timesheets. Now, the creative team is able to manage daily tasks, time tracking, files, conversations, and schedules all in one place.

“Time-tracking is easy so we’re able to more accurately capture the amount of time spent on each task. We also have more transparency into how much non-billable time we spend on each project,” Nikki says.

Workamajig’s fully integrated agency accounting software features then take all of those important project and timeline details and tie them back to financial health and performance. Accountants can use the built-in financial reports to pull balance sheets, corporate P&L statements, and cash projections. Meanwhile, Element’s leadership team gets a holistic view of profitability by client and project and a clear indication of where they can reduce overhead and improve margins.

“Everybody is being held more accountable to our budgets because there’s more transparency in our processes. Workamajig has helped us increase our accountability and it allows our leadership team to dig in further and understand what’s happening in the business,” Nikki says.

“Workamajig’s automation is now doing a lot of
the heavy lifting for us. We’re creating efficiencies
from that standpoint. Another big benefit is that
everything is centralized — our entire team has
one point of truth.”

RESULTS:

INCREASED TRANSPARENCY AND EFFICIENCY 

Six months after implementation, Workamajig has already had a profound effect on Element’s ability to forecast future revenue and it has helped inform more strategic growth decisions.

The level of accuracy that we have on a month-to-month basis is probably the biggest difference. The reports coming out of Workamajig finally give us a true picture of what’s going on financially in our business,” Nikki says.

Workamajig continues to help Element streamline all aspects of project management, resource management, time tracking, budgets, and scheduling. It also ties those important project management capabilities to invoice and billing and real-time financial visibility.

“It’s been so amazing for me to be able to log into the system any time, any day, and get the answers I need as opposed to having to rely on somebody to pull together a report from different systems. I can check the status of projects, the profitability of clients and services, the billability of staff, key metrics for performance evaluations — anything I want. There is so much potential with all of the data the system stores, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Nikki says.

Accurate business intelligence enables Element to scale with confidence. Now every decision is powered by better, data-backed insights, not just gut instincts.

As Element continues to grow, Workamajig scales with them. In the near future, Nikki plans to phase out other disconnected systems and processes and unite everything under one roof.

Workamajig is a very robust tool. It has CRM capabilities, which we’re not utilizing yet but that’s going to be amazing once we turn it on. And we’ll be rolling out the client portal soon, which will be a great asset for our clients,” Nikki says.

“The level of accuracy that we have on a
month-to-month basis is the biggest difference.
The reports coming out of Workamajig finally
 give us a true picture of what’s going
on financially in our business.”