One platform replaced Toggl and spreadsheets

The situation

The Concierge Club is a premium experiential marketing and events agency based in Toronto. Founded in 2011 by Monica Gomez and entirely women and minority owned, it started life as a staffing agency and grew into a specialist in luxury brand activations, producing campaigns across Canada and the United States for global beauty, technology, automotive and retail brands.

Experiential work is unforgiving in a way ordinary project work is not. An activation either lands on the day or it does not, and the budget is committed long before anyone can tell whether it held. As the projects grew more complex, the tooling could not keep pace. Time lived in Toggl, budgets lived in spreadsheets, and reporting was assembled after the fact from both. Fragmented tools hid overages until reconciliation, which meant a job could look healthy right up to the point where the margin had already gone.

What changed

On Function Point, time, budgets and reporting live in one place. The hours the team logs against a job are the same hours leadership reads, so there is no lag between work happening and work becoming visible, and no monthly exercise in stitching two systems together to find out what a project actually cost.

The outcome

The team now watches hours and margins as work happens rather than reconstructing them at the end of a job. Scope creep surfaces while there is still time to have the conversation with a client, instead of after it has already been absorbed.

For an agency whose reputation rests on flawless execution, that means the operational side can be as controlled as the events themselves.