For professional service firms operating across multiple jurisdictions, financial visibility is both a competitive necessity and a significant operational hurdle. Managing cash flow becomes exponentially more complex when your leadership team is geographically distributed.
Unthinkable is an elite, multi-office, cross-border design and digital strategy company. With team members scattered across North America—stretching from Alberta to Nova Scotia and into New York—the firm’s partners manage operations from afar. In a distributed model like this, deliberate, high-fidelity communication is paramount to maintaining corporate health and driving strategy.
Lisa Hagen is a managing partner at Unthinkable. Beyond her high-level strategic responsibilities, she takes the lead on cash flow management and corporate financial reporting. Before discovering a streamlined solution, tracking the firm's capital across borders was a persistent challenge.
According to Hagen, the lack of centralized visibility took a toll on communication. "Unfortunately, everybody just ended up being out of the loop," she notes.
The Friction of Fragmented Financial Data
Hagen is intimately familiar with the financial complexities that mid-sized, established businesses face when balancing budgets, client pipelines, and cash flow projections. Professional service firms rarely operate on a predictable, linear timeline. Delayed collections and fluctuating payment dates routinely threaten to obscure long-term liquidity.
"We’re always invoicing clients and never really know when the money’s actually coming in," Hagen explains. "It’s really hard to get a handle on when the cheque is going to actually get deposited into the account and see how much money we’re going to have on hand over the next six months."
Initially, Hagen attempted to solve this forecasting dilemma using traditional corporate tools. She built a highly complex spreadsheet designed to model future capital. However, the manual solution quickly revealed its limitations. The spreadsheet was incredibly tedious to update, difficult to share securely across borders, and failed to deliver an instantaneous snapshot of the company's financial standing.
The lack of clarity resulted in operational drag. The partners had to schedule frequent, redundant meetings just to dissect and translate the spreadsheet data, pulling precious time away from client acquisition and strategic growth.
How do multi-office professional service firms manage cross-border cash flow effectively?
Multi-office professional service firms manage cross-border cash flow by centralizing financial data into cloud-based predictive tools. This approach eliminates spreadsheet fragmentation, automates currency tracking, and provides real-time, shared visibility to partners across different regions.
Shifting from Reactive Tracking to Proactive Modeling
Recognizing the need for a sophisticated platform built for dynamic forecasting, Hagen implemented Dryrun. The transition allowed Unthinkable to move past static historical accounting and embrace agile, forward-looking scenario modeling—a capability that spreadsheet software simply cannot replicate efficiently.
The impact on Hagen's daily workflow was immediate. Instead of spending hours auditing formulas, updates now take moments.
"I don’t spend a lot of time. It’s really quick to update," says Hagen. "Any time I’m prepping an invoice, or I have received new information about payments, or we are booking new business, I just pop into Dryrun and update my projections in just a few minutes."
Hagen now leverages the platform on a near-daily basis. The tool serves as the single source of truth for the firm’s broader financial runway.
What are the benefits of scenario-based cash flow forecasting for agencies?
Scenario-based cash flow forecasting allows agencies to simulate variables like delayed client payments, new hires, and shifting sales pipelines. This forward-looking model protects profitability and gives leadership teams the clarity needed to make data-driven growth decisions.
To optimize operational forecasting, Hagen uses a multi-layered approach to scenario planning. She structures her analysis using three specific workflows:
- Tracking and dynamically adjusting expected payment dates based on real-time client communication.
- Simulating the immediate and long-term financial impact of operational changes, such as hiring new full-time employees.
- Modeling sales pipelines against historical data to project future revenue valleys and peaks.
This granular visibility has directly influenced how Unthinkable models its future expansion. Hagen utilizes historical project performance data to identify seasonal trends, map client payment behaviors, and pinpoint high-revenue periods.
Borderless Alignment and Executive Confidence
Before implementing a modern forecasting platform, aligning partners across three distinct geographic regions required a chaotic mix of emails, phone calls, and version-controlled spreadsheets. It was a fragile system with no clear mechanism to ensure everyone was viewing the same financial metrics.
Today, Dryrun’s cloud-based architecture ensures that all partners have access to real-time scenarios in a centralized location. The visual, graph-driven interface allows partners to assess organizational health at a glance without needing to decode complex financial lines.
"I think it also gives them a feeling of control and confidence," Hagen says. "They can pop in at any time and see what’s going on. It’s really nice to have the graph and see everything at a glance. It was perfect."
By automating manual updates and eliminating unnecessary financial review meetings, Hagen estimates that she reclaims half a day to a full day’s worth of high-value working hours every single month.
For established business owners and financial professionals navigating distributed growth, upgrading from spreadsheets to dynamic forecasting is the fastest way to eliminate operational friction.
"It’s wonderful," Hagen concludes. "I feel a lot more in control and it has freed up my time. Businesses need it to make their life so much easier. It takes away a lot of the headache and confusion."
Schedule a discovery meeting with our team or start a free trial today to see how we can transform your forecasting process.
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