Prod Co Accountants’ favorite payroll provider? Wrapbook.
Overview
Margot Ransom is always looking forward. In just a few short years, the CEO and founder of Prod Co Accountants has turned her accounting firm from fledgling upstart to household name, particularly in the realm of unscripted production. With her team of six employees—including a payroll specialist, an accounts payable specialist, a staff accountant, an accounting manager, an assistant, and Ransom herself—Prod Co Accountants has worked on projects with industry giants like the Discovery Channel, the Travel Channel, the Learning Channel, and the History Channel.
The firm’s mission is “to make the world a better place through accounting,” a goal they achieve by streamlining their clients’ finances, empowering them to make good decisions quickly, creating good jobs, and donating a portion of each contract to charity.
But as the firm continued to grow (and attract larger and more prominent clients), Ransom realized that not every payroll provider she was working with was created equal. And they certainly weren’t all forward-looking.
Manual data entry, balkanized systems for handling different aspects of each project—Ransom saw that many of the payroll providers out there left a lot to be desired. She needed a payroll partner—one that was as forward-looking and easy-to-use as Prod Co Accountants. She needed a solution that would integrate with their existing tech stack and sync payroll data with accounting seamlessly. She needed a company like Wrapbook.
The Problem
On any production, payroll and accounting are closely linked. Data from payroll makes up a significant portion of a production’s budget, of course, and knowing who has—and has not—been paid is essential to getting an accurate, up-to-date picture of a project’s financials.
The problem, for Ransom, is that most production accounting software doesn’t reflect this reality. Rather, most software treats payroll like its own silo—one that is entirely separate from accounting. For Prod Co Accountants, these existing software solutions fall short in four key areas.
Limited scope: According to Ransom, most accounting software in the production industry is focused on showing data for a single project at a time, which means there’s usually an entirely separate system that companies use to assess their overall financial health across projects. This process, with two separate platforms for assessing project finances and corporate finances, creates a lot of inefficiency.
Limited integrations across the tech stack: With so many different types of software in use across different elements of a production, Prod Co Accountants’ clients could spend hours—days, even—reconciling the data across these systems by hand.
Antiquated Payroll Processes: Traditional payroll processing involves a complicated series of manual steps: uploading PDF timecards, sending them to a paymaster, enduring endless back-and-forth emailing with any edits or changes, and then—once payroll had been processed a couple days later—pulling the relevant data into Prod Co’s accounting software manually.
Slow, frustrating onboarding: Most existing solutions require productions to collect PDFs or worse, manage paper startwork. The process is time-consuming and relies on the client to do a lot of manual data entry.
“I always was thinking, ‘There must be something I don’t know. There must be a reason that everybody uses all these awful softwares.’ But nobody’s ever been able to tell me a good reason.”
Why Wrapbook?
Prod Co Accountants wanted a solution that would simplify managing their clients’ books and seamlessly connect project-level data with corporate-level data. They also sought a user-friendly solution that clients would enjoy using, backed by responsive customer service.
The Solution
The first thing Ransom loved about Wrapbook was its built-in integration with QuickBooks Online. Since Prod Co was already using QBO to maintain general ledgers for their clients, it made perfect sense to find a payroll company that integrated seamlessly with it. And Wrapbook did.
“One of the things we love about working with Wrapbook is that direct integration with QuickBooks because once we click finalize on the payroll, it just automatically magically populates in QuickBooks in all its detail and then from there it goes into the cost reports. So it's happening in pretty much real time.”
The direct connection between Wrapbook and QuickBooks Online significantly improves the efficiency of managing payroll data. This integration allows for real-time processing and reduces the steps needed to transfer payroll data.
Not only that, Ransom was attracted to Wrapbook’s game-changing on-demand payroll capabilities. Wrapbook allows productions to process payroll in real time, without waiting on their paymaster, which greatly speeds up the process of getting workers paid.
“The real-time processing of payroll, the ability to do that without a paymaster—even in the middle of the night! Wrapbook makes it very easy.”
Wrapbook simplifies the onboarding process, too, with profiles that follow workers from job to job. Ransom especially loves the custom startwork generator, which allows productions to build, send, and track the progress of a custom startwork packet—all within the Wrapbook platform.
“There’s always some kind of special document that you need, maybe an NDA, or a release, or something. So [the fact that] the package that goes out to the new staffer is customizable—that's a nice feature.”
Ransom also loves how easy it is to set up a project in Wrapbook. With just a few clicks, she can input the show’s info, upload a certificate of insurance, and get the production’s bank accounts linked quickly and securely using Plaid. It’s all seamless and fast, and it doesn’t require her to interface with the payroll company to get it set up, either.
Business Impact
Working with Wrapbook has transformed Prod Co Accountants' operations. Their internal systems are more seamless, their team can get more done in less time, and—perhaps most importantly—their clients are happier.
“[We] were training a client in using Wrapbook, and showing them how to process a payroll. At the end, we wrapped up and they said, ‘Are you kidding? That’s it? I’ve never seen such an easy process.’”
The Future
Looking ahead, Prod Co Accountants is committed to exploring more of Wrapbook’s accounting features and partnering to continue building innovative production payroll and accounting solutions.
For Ransom, the key to Prod Co’s success has always been looking forward—and she’s excited to continue working with Wrapbook to create tools that meet the evolving needs of the production accounting industry.
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