Culture One World, Washington DC
Industry: Media and Marketing
Situation - Situation - The company was on a growth trajectory. It's existing reporting, financial management systems, and workflows were not geared towards managing high volume transactions while ensuring compliance with applicable laws and regulations. Further, maintaining an adequate liquidity position during project execution was crucial for completing the project. The company required enhanced reporting, data accumulation, cash flow monitoring, and financial management systems to cater to complex needs to drive growth.
Approach – Following tasks were completed, and reforms introduced on a timely basis to achieve the objectives:
- Updated the chart of accounts including the analysis codes to collect data facilitating the indirect cost rate calculations for the company
- Integrated the time writing and expense applications with the accounting system to manage expense reimbursements and invoicing issues per federal fund utilization regulations.
- Prepared the budget for the three years and submitted periodic reports on actual vs. budgets.
- Implemented and integrate a payment platform with the accounting system, to manage vendor payments
- Created a dashboard (using MicroStrategy for data analytics) and KPIs to monitor the media buying activity, invoicing to the client, and payments to the vendors. A weekly presentation was made to the CEO using the dashboard and ensuring that the cash flows remain predictable and are realized on a timely basis.
- Negotiated and used multi-million-dollar credit lines from Facebook and Google to efficiently use the company’s internal funds.
- Prepared monthly financials for the company.
- Monthly meeting with the CEO to discuss general management issues.
Results – Our interventions helped Culture One World in achieving the following results:
- System improvements and financial reforms introduced in the company made it possible to generate accurate and timely financial statements and ensuring adequate liquidity during project execution through monitoring cash flows and managing AP and AR cycles..
- The company managed the cash flow requirement for the media buying cycle with less than 10% of the funding requirement provided through internal funding, which was made possible by better managing vendor credit lines and other working capital management techniques.
