Ignite London
Ignite are experts in experiential, music and events and design services. The business was formed in 2003 and employs 50 staff in its London office and has an annual turnover of £11million.
Ignite have an outstanding heritage in producing large-scale brand experiences for clients in the music and sporting business as well as for the likes of Cirque du Soleil, NFL, Vodafone, and many others.
Financial Controller, Tracey Day manages a small team responsible for keeping the accounting systems of the business on track. The agency is responsible for music and entertainment projects around the globe, so keeping track of all the parts of a major project is key to the success of the business.
Background
Before Paprika was selected, the challenge for the business was efficiency. As with many growing agencies, the process for capturing time and materials expended on client work was flimsy and crude. Timesheets, job costing and billing were created manually in Word and Excel, and so the finance team had to reconcile all these functions by hand. ‘We were not able to capture work in progress as the existing QuickBooks accounts system was very limited and prone to errors’.
Budgets were created in spreadsheets and there was no system for generating Purchase Orders. Only Finance was able to view client activities rather than integrate with users, and the existing accounts package had insufficient memory space ‘which was not suitable for a growing company’.
Solution
Paprika was approached in the summer of 2009 and the selection was made in September. Product implementation and training was completed at the end of November and the system was up and running by the start of January 2010. ‘The implementation and user training was very smooth with very little disruption to finance function’ commented Tracey.
Results
So what are the main benefits of using Paprika? Tracey has experienced significant improvements in the business since Paprika has been installed ‘Our Studio Manager now has real time information so he can report more accurately. The ease of access to information for all staff has resulted in quicker job closures and less amendments.
‘Our invoices are now raised on Paprika with budgets available for all to see. We have better cash flow forecast with the Purchase Order system. We have Account Managers and Finance looking at same information. With more accurate reporting, job closures are completed at the end of the job (as opposed to year-end), so our actuals are reported sooner in the company accounts’.