Elisabeth can generate a month's worth of client invoices in less than an hour.

Clients & Profits also help her balance the shop's limited resources. The time-based staff utilization report show which areas need additional talent, so Elisabeth can bring the right kind of specialist on board just in time. She also shares profitability and productivity reports with the account team, which gives everyone ownership and responsibility for the work. Since bonuses are now awarded if the total billing is within the jobs' estimated amounts, everyone always has a stake in the results. They now know how they contribute to the agency's bottom line.

A client's partner

EB Wall & Associates isn't just a hired-on agency. Instead they position themselves as the clients' partner. Since Clients & Profits tracks both client and job profitability, it helps identify which clients make ideal partners.

Prior to implementing Clients & Profits, the company didn't take the time to do profitability analyses -- it would have been too time consuming and too complicated to calculate, Elisabeth says.

But with Clients & Profits' reports, she quickly saw which clients monopolized the shop's time without producing enough profit. "They just weren't the right fit for our organization," Elisabeth says. She resigned them, and the agency's been more profitable without them.

But when a client is the right fit, the relationships are mutually rewarding. For example, a fifteen-branch regional community bank spent $60,000 on an IRA services ad campaign and produced $750,000 in new business because of EB Wall's work.

Since installing Clients & Profits in 1995, EB Wall & Associates has grown from four to nine employees, moved out of the garage and into a Victorian home-turned-office, and currently represents nationwide clients in industries such as e-commerce, furniture, pharmaceuticals, textiles, medicine, and finance.

The shop continually experiences double-digit billings' growth every year. "Clients & Profits," Elisabeth says, "helps us maintain a sane working environment and lets us grow easily." It's one relationship she's glad she decided to keep.