Quarterly P&L reviews caught over-servicing too late. Leadership was flying blind on margin.
The studio's CFO ran a quarterly project P&L exercise — pulling Harvest hours, vendor invoices, and rate cards into a spreadsheet, allocating fixed overhead, and producing a per-project margin. By the time the exercise finished, the quarter was over. The previous quarter's three worst over-servings had already happened, eaten into margin, and were unrecoverable.
Producer-level visibility was even worse: producers eyeballed Harvest weekly but had no clean view of vendor cost burn or fee burn vs. timeline burn. They consistently caught overruns 60-80% in, when there was no time to renegotiate.
Daily margin per project. Slack alerts at 70% and 90% of burn.
We piped Harvest timesheets, Xero invoices, vendor PO data and the rate card into a Python aggregation that runs every night. Output: per-project daily P&L with three timelines — fee burn, hours burn, vendor cost burn — overlaid on the contracted scope. Alerts fire into a producer-specific Slack channel at 70% (warning) and 90% (escalation).
Critically, the dashboard rolls up: by client, by service line (production / strategy / motion), by producer, and by month. Leadership sees the same numbers producers see, with no quarterly delay.
Eight weeks live across 40 active projects. Three over-servings caught mid-flight.
Three weeks in, the system flagged a project at 71% scope burn with 40% of timeline remaining. Producer renegotiated the scope with the client (additional brand assets had crept in). Six weeks in, two more catches — both renegotiated successfully. Total recovered margin in the pilot quarter: ~€140k.
The behavior change was the bigger win: producers started checking the dashboard daily, not weekly. Conversations with clients about scope happened proactively, not at the post-mortem.
First quarter in three years where we knew project margin in real time. We renegotiated three scopes mid-flight instead of eating the loss.
Six months after rollout.
- Gross margin+12 ppAverage across all projects
- P&L cadenceDailyWas quarterly
- Over-servings caught mid-flight3First pilot quarter
- Recovered margin in pilot quarter—~€140k
- Quarterly report prep time−95%5 days → 4 hours
Tying utilization into the model and forecasting next-quarter capacity.
Phase 2 layered in utilization (planned vs. actual hours per role) and a forward-looking capacity forecast. Result: studio leadership can now see 'we are over-sold on motion in Q3' six weeks before the quarter starts, in time to subcontract or push timelines.