Company name: Zabal Media
Industry: Design & Marketing
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Size: 50
Zabal Media is a full-service digital agency, providing design, marketing, animation, development and strategy services. Since 2019, the talented team works with software companies across industries. We spoke with their founder, Wilian, about why they chose to run their agency operations on Bonsai after previously trying Trello and ClickUp.
Before Bonsai, Zabal Media tracked their tasks and time in ClickUp, and managed finances in QuickBooks. They used spreadsheets to stitch together data from tasks, tracked time, utilization and budgets.
When the team grew to 30 people, Wilian started to feel the limits of their process.
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This system was too time-consuming and error-prone for something as important as understanding agency financials. “I found myself realizing that this is not the role of a founder who's trying to scale past 20 people.” It triggered the search for a more integrated solution that could support the agency's ambitions.
With Bonsai, Wilian found everything they needed in one place: tasks, time tracking, budgets, reports, resourcing, but also invoicing, contracts and proposals. It catered to both their project management and financial tracking needs.
Just last week, Wilian was able to identify underutilized resources in one of their projects and optimize accordingly. That’s exactly the level of of financial clarity they were looking for.
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It was a full-time job at Zabal Media to compute tasks, team hours and project budgets into project financials. Wilian estimates all the hours spent on doing manual calculations in spreadsheets cost them approximately $150,000 each year.
It now takes Wilian and Zabal Media project managers just one click in Bonsai to know exactly how much of the budget has been used up and if a project is on track.
Wilian would block out one day at the end of every month for client billing. He’d go into ClickUp, review billable hours one by one and manually create each invoice.
Today, he goes into his projects in Bonsai to find accurate billable hours, automatically generates his invoices and sends them to his clients.
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Zabal Media’s ambition is to grow to 100 people in the next few years. Wilian is confident Bonsai is the ideal solution to help them get there.
They’re already saving time and money. Now they also have the insights and clarity to confidently scale Zabal Media.
