Now the software is as much a part of the agency as its three principals. "We've been using Clients & Profits for so long, I can't remember what a difference it's made,"Shay says, "but it's made a difference for a long time."

Staying on the leading edge

Technology has reshaped the way companies communicate with their audience, and Strategies redefined its services right along with those changing demands. As technology enables clients to take on more tasks like desktop publishing and building web pages, Strategies revamps its services, out-sourcing old technology and ramping up the new. This keeps the agency on the leading edge. "We're not called Strategies for nothing," Tara says.

New tasks like multimedia and interactive work are added to Clients & Profits with just a few keystrokes so they smoothly integrate into Strategies' work flow.

Managing 400 jobs with little staff

Clients & Profits Pro gives Strategies the power to manage 400 currently open jobs without a lot of staff and no production manager.

Instead, the seven AEs update jobs using the Clients & Profits milestones reports, and adjust schedules as needed right from their computers. Early on, the job type/spec sheets really helped the agency ballpark job schedules because once the sheet was set up, the schedule automatically pulled into the job. Now, with years of historical data in Clients & Profits, AEs know exactly how long it should take to do a certain job and can schedule the work with pinpoint accuracy.

When it comes time to bill, Clients & Profits compiles time and job costs into a neat and simple invoice. Because Strategies takes a holistic approach to marketing, they prefer to send out invoices and estimates that show the grand total, or subtotals with a grand total. "We're selling the value of the complete package," Shay explains, "not the cost of the individual components." This insures an effective end result: Clients get exactly what they need at a previously agreed-upon price.

In the early days, Shay constantly referred to Clients & Profits. "People were amazed that I could get information so quickly," she says. "We'd go absolutely crazy if we couldn't go in and see where a job stands." Using Clients & Profits is as common to the staff as using the telephone.