Getting a grip on irregular cash inflows and international expansion: M2A Media

Sam Hewitt, M2A Media’s CFO, explains how Agicap is helping the company to support its growth beyond the UK to the United States.

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Key takeaways

  • International expansion takes a toll on a company, especially the finance department, which has to deal with multiple entities, bank accounts, credit cards, currencies etc.

  • To consolidate all of the financial data and all of the financial tools involved in the process, there needs to be a cash flow management tool in place to juggle it.

  • To make the best use of irregular income and early upfront payments, a reliable forecasting for spend needs to be in place.

The reason why I chose Agicap over all the cash flow suppliers was because it enabled me to translate my forecasts into cash flow forecasts with the press of a button, as well as integrating with my accounting software and my two different bank suppliers.

Sam Hewitt

CFO of M2A media

M2A Media

  • Industry:

    Media agency

  • Size:

    85 employees

  • Where:

    London

  • Use cases:

    Managing several entities, financing growth, cash management while expanding into another country

Customer’s history

M2A Media is a cloud-based technology media broadcast company located in the heart of London.

The firm has 85 people globally with 55 in the UK and is looking to expand over the next 12 months. One of their next goal is to set up a new company in the US and grow their team locally.

Customer’s needs

  • Managing non-regular inflows of cash

  • Handling upfront payments of license revenue and managing spend throughout the rest of the year

  • Forecasting cash flow and integrating the accounting software and two different bank suppliers in one all-encompassing tool for data analysis and reporting.

Solution

One of the main Agicap features M2A Media use is the forecasting feature. They can now handle the cash flow for their various companies with different payment terms and different revenue streams. The tool was able to help Sam Hewitt forecast those cash flows for those very bespoke customers and deliver the cash flow scenario planning that he was looking for.

Also, the tool integrates with their 4 bank accounts, multiple credit cards and various currencies. This situation used to lead to many inaccuracies and time-consuming tasks on Excel. Now “Agicap allows me to manage that very easily through the live API with the bank account and the daily conversion and into the currency we work in" says Sam.

Another issue M2A was facing was around reporting to management and the board.

With Agicap’s custom dashboard he can now report on key cash flow related KPIs and is able to design bespoke reporting for his CEO and the board in a matter of minutes: “So I'm able to use Agicap live in our management meetings to provide real time dynamic answers to the rest of the senior management team. This is a sort of hugely powerful tool that allows us to make quick, easy decisions.”

Conclusion

  • Expansion of a company in other countries comes with many challenges and requires a cash flow management tool to deal with various currencies, bank accounts etc.

  • Cashflow forecasting is essential to manage irregular income and upcoming spend 

  • Work in real-time with the data and do not wait on figures by the end of the month

Next steps

M2A Media will continue its expansion into the United States and will continue to rely on Agicap to handle the cash flow of the group and the entities, including the different currencies of the respective countries.


Know more about us

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Hertha BSC

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  • Where:

    Berlin, Germany

  • Cashflow Problem:

    Coordinating payment flows is a challenging process that involves communicating with accounting and manually updating Excel tables, which can be very tedious.

Hornberger Consulting

  • Business Sector:

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  • Where:

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Sam Hewitt picture

M2A Media

  • Business Sector:

    Media Agency

  • Where:

    London, United Kingdom

  • Cashflow Problem:

    Manage multiple entities during internalization, managing different currencies and different banking providers