Ad agencies by nature can be a scrappy occupation. More than most businesses, they need to stay on top of their finances to make sure they stay profitable and operate as efficiently as possible. Part of this is generating financial reports that keep the key players in the company informed about the agency’s financial standing.
With this in mind, here are a few examples of some financial reports frequently used by ad agencies to improve their profitability and productivity.
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Staff utilization reports: This report is designed to summarize the hours worked, billable hours and available staff hours, organized by role and staff. The report also provides information about the total available hours for staff within a set range of dates, goals for billable hours, total hours worked and the amount of those hours worked that were billable.
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Profit analysis reports: A profit analysis report goes into detail comparing your estimated costs to actual costs, as well as billable and invoiced amounts. All of this information helps you get a better sense of how profitable your agency’s work is. Ideally, this report will also allow you to filter information by client name, job, project type, specific project, date ranges and job statuses, among other potential filters.
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Work in progress reports: A work in progress report shows financial information including breakdowns of actual, estimated, invoiced, variance and unbilled values. This type of report is, as the name suggests, used for projects that your company is working on but has not yet completed.
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Efficiency reports: An efficiency report focuses on how efficient your entire active staff is. Some of the information it features are the number of billable and non-billable hours, plus a comparison of the value of your billable hours versus each individual’s payroll cost. The idea here is to get a sense of how efficient each of your employees is in their work, where you can stand to improve and what tactics you can use to bring your employees to consistent efficiency levels. The report also will include information about the number of jobs each individual worked on in the report’s time frame.
These types of reports, as well as others that can help your business, are often found on project management software geared toward ad agencies. You can also find templates for these reports elsewhere, but it’s helpful to have software that helps you automate the generation of these reports and keep you more organized in your internal operations, especially with regard to tracking profitability and financial information.
To learn more about the most important financial reports for ad agencies and how you can use them to improve your business operations, contact us at Creative Agency Success today.
