Agency DNA installs AccountAbililty in three weeks

Case Study – Job Management and Accounting

The Customer

Tangent Snowball is a digital & CRM agency that combines data, strategy, technology and creative to help organisations communicate more effectively with their customers across all channels. Their diverse range of clients include, The Labour Party, SAP, Carlsberg, Wolseley, Dunhill, Bang & Olufsen, TAG Heuer and nails inc.

With one of London’s largest agency development teams, they can bring innovative ideas to life creating long-term value and influence.

As well as engaging campaigns and effective, impactful websites, Tangent Snowball has taken a lead in the development of innovative open source digital solutions with its Oscar and TS Connect products.

Oscar – a flexible, scalable E-commerce platform backed up with a super friendly CMS. Oscar works for online retailers whatever the size of their product range whether they’re selling 10 products or 10 million.

TS Connect – a loyalty platform that gathers consumer insight and helps brands connect with independent retailers by giving them direct access to promotions, offers and marketing information. With TS Connect retailers can customise their marketing materials whilst maintaining brand integrity and consistency.

Tangent Snowball is part of Tangent Communications Plc, an AIM listed company (TNG).  They are based in Central London with approximately 90 employees.

The Challenge

Through various mergers and acquisitions over the years Tangent Snowball had developed two fairly different streams that had quite different management information needs.  Tangent Snowball has a strong digital agency culture but it also has a strong software development core giving rise to varying system requirements and needs, which had to be more clearly defined and better understood.

The product that was in place was not integrated into their financial system making financial analysis more difficult and job profitability unreliable.  It was also difficult to gain learning from what had happened in the past in terms of financials and efficiency.  The team was very emotional about the existing system; they found it complicated and did not like using it.

 The incumbent, in an aggressive stand on renewal, threatened to turn off their system as soon as the contract ran out. Therefore the new system had to be installed within one month if Tangent Snowball did not want to loose their data.

 The Solution

 The Finance Director started to search for a replacement system. 

“I spoke to the usual job management and accounting system providers and for one reason or another, including cost and complexity, I decided not to go ahead with any of them.  A system I had used in the past was a contender until I spoke to a contact of mine who recommended AccountAbility.  Following the demo we signed a contract almost immediately as we really like the product.  It was cost effective and they could deliver on installation and training within our tight time constraints.” Stated Alexandra Frew, Finance Director. 

The Results 

From beginning to end the system was fully installed within three weeks.  Over a 1,000 live jobs, 12,000 lines of time entries and full financial data was loaded into AccountAbility.  Plus all 90 users were fully trained.

Immediately Tangent Snowball saw the results.   The team found the system flexible, intuitive and easy to use, therefore are fully compliant in entering data. They can now perform in-depth analysis which is beneficial to both the business and clients. 

“AccountAbility has changed the culture of the company and has made us much more integrated.  Teams have a greater understanding and appreciation of what constitutes a job running well and can now see both sides of the coin.  It has made people more accountable” Alexandra Frew, Finance Director.

The Management Team now has full visibility of the business and as they are able to extract all the data from AccountAbility they can really understand what is going on.  With this invaluable data they can see what areas of the business are more profitable and therefore are able to run all jobs more profitably. 

“Chris Lever at AgencyDNA was excellent, he has a great understanding of the industry and is not another sales person, he really helped us.  He has fantastic enthusiasm and nearly a year down the line, I still have lots of contact with him. 

AccountAbility are flexible and always ready to listen.  When I have made recommendations they are open to exploring change, which you do not find with many other companies” stated Alexandra Frew.