She started with CYMA, a DOS-based accounting package with the basics: G/L, A/P, A/R and payroll. They quickly outgrew it and switched to Peachtree for Macintosh, supplemented with a variety of word processing and spreadsheet programs. “I got so tired of not having the information at my fingertips,” Melanee says. Finally, after ten years of making do, they decided to find a product that was tailored to their industry. “We wanted something that would handle accounting, and also our jobs, costs and time.”

Melanee looked into Adman and Control G, but purchased Clients & Profits Classic. “Clients & Profits understands agencies in the way it ties together jobs, costs, and time. The others seemed to be written more by programmers because their reports were so hard to print and even more difficult to interpret,” Melanee says. The reports from Clients & Profits are much easier to understand. “Clients & Profits,” she says, “was like a breath of fresh air.”

Getting started with jobs

The first order of business was to start the job tracking and time keeping with Clients & Profits. This has proven to be the most useful because they now never lose track of job costs or billable hours and everything gets billed to the right job.

Online purchase orders had an instant benefit for the shop. Along with a sophisticated and professional look, POs helped them immediately keep on top of job costs. Before Clients & Profits, they were chasing a paper trail every time they ordered something from a vendor.

Now, all their purchases are recorded electronically, without rekeying. This has made the job cost review and billing process much easier. Melanee also prints reports to analyze vendors, checking to see if the production staff is estimating their costs accurately. “The PO system is great,” Melanee says, since tracking and reviewing job costs is much simpler than before. “We now can continuously evaluate our vendors.”

Being in business for 15 years, things are bound to change. The company has seen the emergence of the internet as a marketing tool, and incorporating new services into Clients & Profits such as web design is seamless. “We just add the new tasks to the task table and we're up and running,” she says. “Clients & Profits changes with the times very easily.”

100 percent accurate

Clients & Profits' automated time-keeping feature has eliminated countless hours the staff used to spend shuffling paper time slips, as well as streamlined the entire accounting process. It used to take Melanee an entire day to print a run of checks, but now it takes only 15 minutes. “Years ago, we even used to manually type our vendor checks using an IBM Selectric typewriter,” Melanee laughs. Now, they let Clients & Profits automatically print checks for them. They also save time by “cloning” jobs, which duplicates an existing job into a brand-new one. “We do the same type of work over and over, and being able to clone jobs decreases our data entry time on a daily basis.” That has meant more billable hours for the production staff.

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