Seven signs you need agency management software

In the fast-paced lane of agency life, decisions are generally made quickly with two over-arching goals in mind: client happiness; and profitability. As an agency grows, it’s typical for new systems, applications and tools to be ‘bolted on’ as and when the business needs new capabilities. Strategic investment decisions around holistic agency management software solutions tend to be de-prioritized in the face of more immediate decisions to deliver client happiness and profitability.

The result? Over time, using multiple systems leads to highly inefficient communication and collaboration because agency teams need to double-handle information to get things done. Reporting becomes challenging, invoicing can be a headache, and costs grow from paying multiple license fees to run multiple software solutions.

Ironically, all-in-one agency management software is exactly what agencies need to drive better business results. Agency management software lets agencies make their workloads more predictable, repeatable, and efficient to better support clients, scale for growth and improve profitability.

Whether you’re a growing agency continually adding people, processes, and technology to improve efficiency or you’re an established agency looking to upgrade existing systems, these seven signs are triggers to consider investing in agency management software solutions:

1. Multiple systems
Using multiple systems to run your agency rapidly becomes vastly inefficient. Multiple systems mean your team must constantly move between different tools and applications to get their work done, which takes time. Numerous systems make onboarding new employees more complex and slower, and can cause mistakes because your teams need to remember different processes, tools and rules. A single agency management software solution streamlines how work moves across your agency, making your team more productive and efficient.

2. An in-house system
As an agency grows, supporting an in-house system can prove expensive, time-consuming, resource intensive, and even risky. There are the costs and time necessary to maintain physical hardware, and the challenges of finding and retaining the right talent to support and scale the system. And there is the need to protect the sensitive data belonging to your clients and your business in an age of rapidly growing cyberthreats. Cloud-based agency management software solutions are reliable, cost-effective to run, easy to implement and scale, and fundamentally more secure and disaster-proof than on-premise systems.

3. Inconsistent reporting
With information scattered across different systems, reporting can become a headache that agencies tend to skim through now and again to track high-level trends. The hard reality is that the insights that separate good agencies from great agencies lie in detailed data. Robust, reliable, real-time reporting is a secret to agency success. World-class agency management software solutions feature flexible built-in reporting options capable of delivering meaningful and actionable insights to keep your agency profitable. If you’re struggling to maintain profitability, optimize team utilization, meet deadlines, or track invoices and payments efficiently, consider agency management software and the powerful reporting insights it delivers to set your agency on the path to success.

4. Too many internal meetings
Time is one of the most valuable, scarce and expensive resources an agency manages every day. Internal meetings are a huge time sink for agencies, often resulting in billable time that needs to be absorbed by the agency as cost. If your team needs multiple internal meetings to stay up to date on a client account, agency management software can help. Agency management software centralizes essential information for fast, easy access anytime, anywhere. Transparent workflows move key tasks from one owner to the next efficiently, while shared job dashboards give teams visibility into project status. Agency management software helps your entire team get on the same page, without a single meeting.

5. Pattern of client over-servicing
Does your team have a habit of consistently over-servicing clients? The first step to correcting a client over-servicing pattern is to become aware of the situation and quantify how the over-servicing is happening. Centralized agency management software helps identify and correct over-servicing patterns in three ways: flexible time management options to help you understand where time is being spent; built-in alerts to remind account teams that allocated retainer hours are almost fully used; and comprehensive real-time reporting to help you better monitor demanding clients.

6. Poor support for remote and mobile workers
Can your team work remotely from your offices and connect to the information they need to do their jobs anytime, anywhere, and from any device? If not, cloud-based agency management software is the answer. Cloud technology facilitates fast collaboration, easy scalability, and the power to gather information from multiple sources and share it across multiple applications to drive better decision-making. It does this in real time and with unparalleled security, anywhere your team might be working, and on any device.

7. Separate accounting system
Do stress levels peak at your agency at month end because of the time needed to transfer information from your agency management tools into a separate accounting system to create invoices? Double handling information is no-one’s dream, particularly with pressure to issue invoices in a timely manner. The good news is that agency management software integrated to your financial management tools helps your agency be efficient, accurate and profitable. No more time-consuming double-handling of information that ends up peppered with mistakes. Instead, agency management software allows you to create a simple and easy accounting solution that streamlines invoice preparation, expense management and payment tracking.

Explore agency management software

If one or more of the above signals sounds like your agency, it is time to explore the benefits agency management software can deliver your business.

Function Point cloud-based agency management software is an all-in-one solution that helps agencies improve business performance. Our software delivers flexible, powerful, secure solutions for resource management, project management, collaboration, accounting and invoicing, reporting and business intelligence. We help agencies support happy clients more efficiently and profitably.

Tour our solutions for more information or contact us to request a demo.