How M3.agency boosted profit by 25% using Synergist

The problem

Manual processes and no real-time visibility

Up until summer 2022, M3.agency were using a bespoke system of their own, which was no longer supported, was starting to become clunky, and didn’t connect with Sage.

“We used to raise job bags and quotes in the system, manually raise purchase orders from Sage, then at the end of the month everybody physically typed up emails of what their invoices were going to be. The accounts team then had to retype this all into Sage as invoices.”

“There was lots of manual work, lots of duplication, and, as a result, lots of errors and time spent rechecking. Even still, our forecasted figures against our management accounts were always out of sync.” 

“Time was recorded manually, so we were working with it retrospectively, which meant it was too late to try and correct anything.”

“I didn’t have a single view of what work was coming in, work in progress, what was due to billing, what profit would be and what utilisation of hours were. I didn’t know how we were performing until after month-end, which was not anything I could actually change. All of that was a nasty headache after the event.”
 
“There was resistance to move away from what we’d always done, but it became clear to become more efficient and grow, we needed to do something.”

The solution

A game changer

“We did find it hard to commit to a change, and we had lots of questions and demos. But the catalyst came when we found out that Synergist can link directly to Sage. So we still use Sage for the cash side of things, and Synergist is for job management and reporting – but everything now links up in a way it never did before.”

“We’ve got so much more confidence in the figures now. We didn’t used to know what was happening until the following month, but now I can run reports daily, weekly or monthly. I can deal with it in real time, which is a much more agile and efficient way of working.”

One of the other sticking points was security, with some of the stakeholders concerned about sensitive data being accessible. 

“We’ve actually found the opposite is true. It’s a hugely private and trustworthy system, and only the people we enable are granted visibility of our data.”

“We were keen to understand what our forecasting is in terms of sales and gross profit, who’s using hours and how, what our external costs are – and we can completely rely on Synergist for that."

The return

Increased profits, calmer working

Synergist has given M3.agency the evidence-based data to quote more accurately and manage scope creep if it starts to become an issue. 

“These can be really difficult conversations to have, but now we can have more professional conversations about job progress. We give our clients a weekly update as to where they’re at against their budget, and together, we can make data-driven decisions.”

“We get a daily report telling us if any timesheets are missing, we’re very hot on this and it helps keep our data bang up to date.”

“Everyone is now much more commercially minded, and collectively, we know this makes our lives much easier. Our agency is a calmer place. If there’s a problem it’s quickly highlighted and we can deal with issues before they become problems. 

“It’s also helped us manage our utilisation levels much better – now we have utilisation targets for each person and real-time visibility. We can make sure we’re not overworking people, and they can understand where they’re using their time and how it can be improved. Work-life balance has improved.”

“We’ve found it has been really helpful for our creative and digital teams to access reports, to understand what’s forecast and if they need to recruit. We can make decisions based on the figures. It’s made our conversations and planning much better.”