Anonymised client engagement · Creative agency

From month-end hindsight to daily control of job profitability

A growing creative agency needed a dependable daily view of job-level profitability, after six months of internal and outsourced attempts had failed to produce one.

01

The challenge

The agency had spent months trying to create a dependable daily profit-and-loss view. Internal teams and external finance support had not been able to make the relevant data usable at the pace the business needed. By the time a project’s financial position was clear, there was often little opportunity to act.

02

What Woodlark built

Woodlark connected the agency’s financial and operational data, including its accounting platform, and developed a dashboard that showed daily, job-level profitability.

03

The change

The creative director could see work beginning to drift over budget sooner, as well as the work delivering healthy margin. That meant delivery, resourcing and commercial decisions could be made from current information, not month-end hindsight.

The system, in three words

Daily P&LJob costMargin

Job margin — today Synthetic data

Live jobs

Brand refresh — retail client+34%
Campaign film — two edits+22%
Packaging system rollout+7%
Website build — phase two−4%
Exhibition stand design+27%

Drift since Monday

Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Proj

Website build flagged on Wednesday, not at month end

Illustrative visual — A recreated job-margin dashboard using synthetic data.

This is an anonymised Woodlark client engagement. Client identity, sensitive data and identifiable materials have been withheld.

You should not have to wait until month-end to see whether a job is working.

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