From Working Capital Under Pressure to Financial Visibility: Structuring a Growing Agency
Launch date: 2025
Industry: Architecture firm
Business: Consulting on building renovation and restoration
Stack: Finance, Accounting, Tech
Specifics: Working capital financing / Debt financing
“PDA is an agency specializing in the renovation of exceptional properties in dense urban areas. Its successful repositioning over the past few years has enabled it to reach a new level in terms of deal size, which has raised various challenges regarding growth financing and working capital. We first focused on a targeted initiative aimed at providing cash flow relief, then undertook the work necessary to enable the CEO to drive margin improvement.”
Using our reporting as a basis, we activate key levers
, to create value.
Secure a medium-term credit facility to finance the agency's structural working capital needs
Issues
- High working capital requirements due to the business model (billing customers in installments after paying suppliers)
- Moving up to larger projects that require significant cash advances
- The lack of financial management tools makes it difficult to justify the company's financial position to banks
- Significant pressure on cash flow due to fluctuating profitability
Results
- Preparation of a comprehensive credit committee report, including a structured financial history and projections
- Executive coaching for bank meetings and negotiating offers
- Securing a medium-term credit facility to ease cash flow and highlight strategic priorities to management
Structure project-level profitability tracking to optimize margins
Issues
- Lack of visibility into actual margins by architectural project
- Difficulty in identifying the most profitable projects to guide sales efforts
- The need to distinguish between net revenue (after distribution to subcontractors) and gross margin
- Need to accurately categorize co-contractors and subcontractors using analytical tags
Results
- Implementation of an analytical tracking system in Pennylane to track net revenue and gross margin by project
- Automated data integration between Ooti (project management tool), Pennylane, and Google Sheets via our tech stack
- Monthly reporting, including an analysis of historical margins by project and EBITDA-to-Cash ratios for working capital management
- Systematic reconciliation between operational data (Ooti) and accounting data (Pennylane) to ensure reliability
Migrate to a modern accounting tool and ensure real-time bookkeeping
Issues
- A legacy accounting system ill-suited to the needs of a growing architecture firm
- The need to categorize cash in detail to distinguish between the agency's own cash flows and payments to subcontractors
- Need to automatically integrate payroll (Silaé) for a consolidated view
- Ensure that the accounting records are always up to date to support monthly financial reporting
Results
- Successful migration to Pennylane for the 2025 fiscal year, with settings tailored to the agency's business model
- Ongoing bookkeeping: entry of customer and vendor invoices, account reconciliation, bank reconciliation, and analytical categorization of cash
- Automating payroll imports via Silaé for a consolidated view of payroll expenses
- Reduced time to produce financial statements and improved data reliability
Results in figures
built-in tools (Pennylane, Ooti, Silaé, etc.) to automate reporting
medium-term credit facility obtained to finance working capital
revenue managed with monthly visibility into margins by project
"On credit support: 10/10 - good feedback from banks, compliments from banks on the results (...) and on Pennylane integration: 10/10"
They transformed their finances with us
