Budgeted hours tracking & reconciliation
Design and validation of a dashboard to monitor budgeted hours, hours consumed, and financial deviations without relying on manual analysis.
Design and validation of a dashboard to monitor budgeted hours, hours consumed, and financial deviations without relying on manual analysis.
Content Studio is a suite of tools designed to automate, control, and track audiovisual productions. The Finance team needed greater visibility into one of the projects' key data points. Data analysis relied on external tools.
Financial analysis depended on manual steps and external tools. Hours were logged in the time-tracking module, went through approvals, and then had to be reconciled against the corresponding budget.
To gain visibility, the team downloaded the data as a CSV, uploaded it to an external dashboard, and reviewed deviations in weekly meetings.
This created three main problems:
Fragmented information
The data needed to understand a production's financial status was spread across different modules, spreadsheets, and external dashboards.
Lack of early visibility
Deviations between logged hours and budget were detected late, during the Finance team's weekly review.
Manual operational process
The team relied on exports, data cross-checking, and meetings to understand which productions were within or outside budget.
The analysis showed that the problem wasn't just about visualizing data, but about connecting different parts of the flow: hour logging, approval, budgeting, reconciliation, and financial follow-up.
We designed a dashboard within Content Studio to compare budgeted hours, hours consumed, and costs associated with each production.
Beyond the dashboard, we designed a reconciliation view to review hours, costs, and statuses associated with a production.
This view made it possible to move from general monitoring to operational review, distinguishing between pending, approved, and reconciled information.
We validated the proposal with Finance and Operations to check whether the flow covered the process's main actions:
The review made it possible to adjust the information hierarchy, reinforce states and visual indicators, and better connect the dashboard to daily operations.
Integrated flow
The need for manual exports to external tools was eliminated.
Early deviation detection
Overuse or underuse of time and budget mismatches are identified quickly.
Structured follow-up
Issues are reviewed periodically in weekly meetings.
Simplified cost approval
Detecting and bulk-approving pending costs became easier.
The Finance team went from reviewing fragmented information across external tools to monitoring and resolving deviations from a single, integrated flow within Content Studio.