Product category:
Direct marketing agencies
News Release from: Target Direct Marketing | Subject: Maconomy X
Edited by the Marketingservicestalk Editorial
Team on 10 September 2007
Maconomy X aids TDM's financial
management
Target Direct Marketing provides creative and marketing services to a wide range of clients in the charitable and commercial sectors, with the help of robust and responsive management systems.
As well as developing the ideas behind high-performance marketing initiatives the group also provides the practical backbone to any marketing campaign: database management and analytics in one company, and print production in the other TDM describes its business as responsible marketing, and to keep control of the financial well-being of its multi-stranded organisation it needs equally responsive systems
Like all agencies that sell projects measured in consultants' time it needs closely to monitor what resources, including its human capital, are allocated to each task and how well it is progressing against budget.
However, the print management part of the business in particular has a different method of billing.
This part of the company does not base its costs on consultant time; instead the major input is supplier costs.
Print jobs can be spread over several weeks from initial planning to delivery, so managing supplier costs was done through the work-in-progress ledgers.
Until recently, the company had been using an early version of Maconomy as a job costing system, with a bolted-on financial model.
This enabled it to manage the disparate costing models used within the three units of the organisation.
TDM's financial handlers and account managers were very pleased with the system they had; there was no need to use spreadsheets and re-key information.
It made their financial processes less prone to errors as a result.
It helped them give up to date client profitability reports, and screen shots of how a job was progressing against its benchmarks.
However, two factors made the company consider upgrading to the most current version of Maconomy's system.
First of all it updated the operating system on its entire estate of Mac laptop and desktop computers, which neatly coincided with new and impressive functionality in Maconomy X.
Marie Newcombe at TDM explained: "It's difficult to imagine what other system we could use as our version of Maconomy worked very well for us for seven years, but when Maconomy X came out we were impressed by the added features, particularly the web portal, which enables us to tailor the screens we view.
"The creatives can view their timesheets directly, for example, while the executives have access to financial planning data".
As well as the functionality of a web portal, Maconomy X also offers TDM a single-sign-on option.
For a company like TDM, which has a separate database for each division, signing on separately to each system is irritating at best and time consuming at worst.
Single sign-on means that once an individual has secure access to one database, he or she has access to the others too.
TDM has also found that Maconomy X provides it with even better information that is much easier to find.
There is no need to export data to view it, so there's no need for complex integration with other applications like Excel or FileMaker.
Jobs can be tracked against budget much more simply and, most importantly, it is much easier to fill in time sheets.
Newcombe said: "Filling in timesheets has to be everyone's least favourite job - but from a financial point of view it is one of the most important.
"However, as soon as anyone logs into the new Maconomy X system they are prompted to do their timesheet, so there's no desperate scrambling around at the end of the week trying to work out where time was spent.
"It makes client billing much more accurate, and keeps over-servicing to a minimum.
"Our staff also like Maconomy X because it looks like the familiar Windows environment so it is incredibly intuitive to use - no extensive training that distracts from fee-earning work is needed".
She concluded: "With several business units and different billing methods in place at TDM, we need sophisticated software to support all our members of staff; Maconomy has managed to achieve that level of sophistication, while remaining really easy for all of us to use.
"This is software that fits into the way that we work - not the other way round".
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