Spreadsheets in a Pantone World: Being an accountant at a marketing agency

Halimat Abiola — Finance Associate

The first thing you should know is that nobody on my team has ever asked me what I do for fun.

Not because they're rude. They're some of the warmest, most brilliant people I've ever worked with. It's just that by the time someone needs to speak to me, it's usually because a client paid late, someone renewed a subscription with their personal card and forgot to mention it for three weeks, or we're trying to figure out why the numbers in one spreadsheet refuse to agree with the numbers in another.

Most accountants I trained with went into banks, audit firms, or oil and gas. They wear pressed shirts, discuss IFRS, and close month-end in quiet offices. I work from my reading table, and last Tuesday I found myself explaining to a designer what a maker-checker process is.

It's not the accounting career I imagined.

I'm glad it isn't.

Creative agencies have taught me that finance is less about numbers than it is about rhythm. Money doesn't arrive in neat, predictable cycles. A major contract gets signed and everyone exhales. Then three months pass before the invoice is paid, while salaries, software subscriptions, production costs, freelancers, taxes, and vendors continue to demand attention. Somewhere in the middle, the exchange rate changes, a client asks for one more revision, and suddenly the margin you thought you had begins to disappear.

Over time, you stop looking at cash flow as a spreadsheet and start reading it like a pulse. You know which clients pay in thirty days and which only move after three follow-up calls. You know which projects look profitable on paper but quietly consume twice the hours they were budgeted for. You learn that many agencies don't fail because the work isn't good enough. They fail because nobody is watching the timing of the money.

That's probably why I've never believed the cliché that accountants and creatives are opposites.

The designers I work with are some of the most disciplined people I know. They refine endlessly, obsess over details, and discard dozens of ideas before finding the right one. Accounting isn't all that different. We both spend our days reducing chaos into something that makes sense. We simply happen to use different tools.

The interesting part is that creatives rarely want someone to tell them "no." They want someone to explain what's possible.

Don't tell me we can't buy new equipment. Show me the revenue target that gets us there.

Don't tell me the budget is tight. Show me how pricing this project differently changes the outcome.

When numbers are explained properly, they stop being restrictions. They become strategy.

One thing the job gives you is an unusual perspective on the people around you. You quietly accumulate details that never appear in company meetings. You know which client will question every VAT line, which freelancer won't begin work without a deposit, and which "small favour" will somehow become the most expensive project of the quarter.

You also know what everyone earns.

That's a strange responsibility because it means you witness people's lives from a distance. You see promotions, weddings, children, loans, difficult months, and moments when someone is finally doing better than they were a year ago. You carry all of that quietly. It's part of the job.

If accounting has taught me one lesson, though, it's this: the most expensive word in a creative business is often yes.

Yes to the exciting client who isn't ready to pay.

Yes to the passion project that keeps expanding.

Yes to the "small favour" that quietly consumes weeks of billable time.

Every yes has a cost. Designer hours. Opportunity cost. Cash flow. Focus. Sometimes the accountant's role is simply to make those invisible costs visible before excitement makes the decision for everyone else.

When people ask what I do now, I no longer say I manage the books.

I say I help keep the agency alive.

Not because accounting is more important than strategy, design, or client service, but because every campaign depends on someone making sure the numbers work. While everyone else is building ideas, someone has to make sure the business they're being built inside can survive long enough to produce the next one.

There'll never be an award for the best cash flow forecast. Nobody will showcase a bank reconciliation on Behance. That's fine.

Every great campaign needs people who imagine what's possible. It also needs someone quietly making sure there's enough money in the account to make it happen. At this time and in this moment, I'm lucky to be a key cog of both.