How Jellybean transformed revenue management using Synergist

The problem

Spreadsheets holding it all together

Jellybean had used Synergist since 2014 but, by its own admission, hadn't kept pace with the platform. "We probably weren't using it to the capabilities that it had," says Cass.

Jellybean pre-billed jobs in Synergist, but these amounts weren't separated out, so Synergist's revenue reports showed the invoice as earned the moment it was raised, even where the work was still to be done. "It seemed insane that you could never look at Synergist at any point in time and know what was left on the job."

The finance manager kept a manual deferred income spreadsheet outside the system, reconciled by hand every month end across "20 odd 30 clients", a reporting burden done twice over. 

Purchase costs told a similar story. Synergist held time against jobs, but freelance, print and media costs went straight to the agency's finance manager, tracked and accrued manually outside the system. "We were time-sheeting, time was there, but not costs. We were missing some key information," leaving account handlers with no true picture of what a job had actually cost, or a way to spot over-servicing before it became a problem.

Jellybean's three divisions, retail, food service and digital, compounded the problem. Digital work generated inside retail or food service jobs had to be split out invoice by invoice: "if you imagine that times 200 jobs every month, it's hugely time consuming."

All of this ran on one person's spreadsheets. Account handlers had to ask the finance manager to check them directly, because only she had access: "we could only have one master, otherwise these things get horrible." When Jellybean's long-serving finance manager, who had run billing and accounts for 25 years, announced her retirement, the agency had to confront how much of its process still lived outside Synergist.

The solution

A complete financial picture

Cass used the transition to properly adopt Synergist capabilities the agency had underused.

Revenue recognition solved the pre-billing problem directly. "When we heard that revenue recognition was something that we could do, that was a no-brainer, really," says Cass. Account handlers now raise their own draft invoices and recognitions, checked by Cass before anything is finalised, giving them much more control over their own jobs because they've got all the information. Billing itself has got quicker as well, through billing plans: "It's just a tick, tick, tick sort of thing and off it goes."

Purchase orders and invoices, not previously logged in Synergist, now feed the dashboards alongside time already tracked, giving account handlers a true picture of job cost and margin. "Now that we are putting the right information in, we're getting the right information out." 

Switching on departmental revenue analysis automated the three-way revenue split. Once charge codes were mapped to the right department, revenue splits automatically across Jellybean's three divisions with no manual intervention. "It does it automatically for us and there's just no room for error. There's no room for dispute even."

Throughout the transition, Synergist's agency finance expert Jenna supported Jellybean's training and reporting. "She's been an absolute superstar," Cass says. "Nothing ever was a 'well, no, you can't do that.' It was always a 'let me just work a report out for you.'"

Asked what she'd tell herself a year ago, Cass doesn't hesitate: "It's going to save you so much time, and you're going to have so much more information at the click of a button, which isn't on 600 different spreadsheets."

The return

Real-time numbers the whole team trusts

"Time saving has been huge because we're not having to handle those separate calculations and create all of our month end reports based on the combination of Synergist and the manual calculations." Billing is faster too, for account handlers who used to lose a full day a month to spreadsheet-based invoicing. "I have heard a couple of the account team actually say, oh, billing is so much quicker."

The bigger shift is cultural. Account handlers, who once had little visibility of job profitability, are now accountable for their own recognition decisions. "I think there's a lot more accountability. They can make an informed decision about what to recognise, whereas before they didn't know."

That's backed by real-time reporting confidence. "We can now look at data, like an average hourly charge out rate per client, where we're over servicing, client recovery and things like that, which we always wanted to do but the manual labour was immense. Now it isn't."

That confidence extends outward too: Jellybean's outsourced finance partner now logs into Synergist directly to pull the data it needs for month-end reporting, rather than waiting on manual figures.

"Our reporting has just been transformational. That's the biggest benefit for me really: knowing that what's in there is right, and we're using it. It's feeding into our reports, it's feeding into our information to drive the business forward. That's irreplaceable, really."