Anyone who has worked within the live events industry knows what a dynamic, but intense and demanding environment it can be. Periods of little activity are followed by spells of intense pressure when production managers, coordinators and all members of the event team are frantically striving to get things organised to meet the immovable deadline of the next live event date. The last thing that event team members want in this sort of environment is to have to worry about administrative tasks or providing costing information required for project accounting. On the other hand, it is extremely important that a project is well managed, budgets are set and a proper control of costs is achieved or the event can quickly get out of hand and thousands of pounds can be lost within a few days.
The dilemma faced by management is that in the live events industry, staff come from creative backgrounds and are often sceptical about software that attempts to structure their work or adds only an administrative burden but does not benefit them directly. There are many project costing applications on the market today but most of these simply focus on fulfilling the administrative tasks of recording committed costs through purchase orders or requisitions and timesheets.
Experience has taught us that project staff within live event management and production companies want much more than this. They want to be able to easily and quickly create budgets that can be submitted to their clients and where necessary create different versions of a budget or a single budget with optional items that can easily be included at a later date if accepted by the client. They do not want to use software that places restrictions on the presentation or layout of a budget to be presented to a client based on accounting driven cost centres or codes. When a project goes live, project staff want to be able to easily see how costs accrue against each of the originally budgeted items, to be able to raise Purchase Orders for budgeted items and be reminded if the cost exceeds the original budget.
Traditionally, project costing applications have been built as an add-on to an existing accounting application. The Procim software however is an independent software solution specifically designed to help manage margins as well as address the problems and requirements of “front office” personnel whether involved in event production, logistics, creative design, graphics and digital media or film and video, including aspects such as project budgeting and cost control as well as project based business process automation. Millions are lost every year in the creative industries to ineffective budgeting, not to mention the intense stress creatives and management suffer under the burden of outdated tools.
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