Case Study - True's Return to Pegasus: What Two Years on a Cheaper System Actually Cost
"It's just how simple everything is — how quick and easy it is to get reports out. I only do three days a week, and it's easy to manage doing everything, start to finish, in that time." — Sally Lloyd, Finance Director, True
True is a creative and digital agency based in Auckland, with just over 20 staff, running the usual mix of creative, production, social and digital work. They also part-own Moves, a motion graphics company. Finance Director Sally Lloyd runs the entire finance function for both businesses — salaries, admin, HR, the lot — on her own, three days a week.
That setup was tested when Sally won a competition and found herself overseas for five weeks, straight through month-end, with no say over the dates. "It highlighted pretty much how you shouldn't really have a one-man band running all the finance functions," she says. It's the kind of situation that only works if the system underneath it is simple enough to hand over, or fast enough that a few days away doesn't turn into a backlog.
For True, that system is Pegasus. But it wasn't always.
The Challenge: When Cheaper Wasn't Actually Cheaper
True first used Pegasus, then moved to a different system for two years, then came back. The initial decision was straightforward: the other system was significantly cheaper.
"The decision was basically financial," Sally says. "But I guess at the end of the day, it actually didn't turn out to be as economic as we thought it was."
The reasons stacked up over those two years:
Revenue recognition was "an absolute pain." What was straightforward in Pegasus became a manual, error-prone process.
Very few canned reports. "You had to pretty much dump data out and manipulate data to create the reports that you wanted."
Month-end took days, not hours. "It would take me days to get my monthly reports out on the other system. Whereas with Pegasus, I probably get them out easily in a day."
No job cost overrun visibility. "That sort of visibility just wasn't really there. You had to go hunting around for things... and by that stage it's all too late."
Every job-related invoice needed a PO, with no flexibility. "This doesn't always happen in the real world," as Sally puts it — a rule that didn't match how agencies actually run.
After two years, the calculation had flipped. What looked cheaper on the license cost was quietly expensive in time, and time was the one thing a single-person finance function couldn't spare.
Back to Pegasus, and Straight to Work
The return wasn't a hard adjustment. Asked what surprised her the second time around, Sally's answer was simple: nothing did. She picked up where she'd left off, plus a few genuine improvements — AP invoice attachments, and a new integration with Float that now handles time tracking for the whole creative and studio team.
Day-to-day, Pegasus now runs True's full financial rhythm: job costing, weekly forecasting meetings with a traffic-light system for revenue tracking, JCR-time invoicing, and month-end reporting that no longer takes a week.
The Results
Reporting that takes a day, not days. "It would take me days to get my monthly reports out on the other system. With Pegasus, I get them out easily in a day."
Job cost overruns get caught while there's still time to act. True uses Pegasus's job cost overruns reporting to flag jobs that are starting to run over, with notes attached explaining why. "You're not asking the same question over and over again. You've got an answer sitting there."
Client profitability, not just revenue. Sally built her own reports comparing each client's revenue against the resource cost behind it. "You get clients where the revenue looks pretty good, but when you actually look at what the cost of the resource that's gone into it, then they're not looking so good." That visibility now goes straight to the leadership team.
A feedback loop that actually ships. When Sally flagged that Pegasus's PO approval flow didn't automatically surface who'd raised the PO, she mentioned it to the Pegasus team. A couple of weeks later, it was fixed. "It just automatically pops up now, and you don't have to go searching around for it."
Room to take on more, not just keep up. Sally has gone from full-time to three days a week and still runs everything. That spare capacity is now going into a new project: reworking how freelancer costs get allocated against jobs, rather than sitting in her own budget line with no accountability for hours run over. It's a work in progress, but it's the kind of improvement that's only possible because the basics — reporting, revenue recognition, job visibility — aren't taking up the rest of her week.
Want True's story to share with your own team? Download the one-page summary, Sally's results, her advice to other finance teams, and the key numbers, ready to send on or print. Download the case study →
Rethinking How Estimates Work
Pegasus has also changed how True prices work for clients. Instead of quoting by hours and sharpening the pencil when a job comes in over budget, True now works from around six standard deliverable templates, priced individually.
"It's not us that's taking a bath on the budget," Sally says. "It's like, no, you need to reduce what you want to meet your budget." More often than not, clients find the extra budget rather than cutting scope. (For more on why this shift matters, see our piece on value-based estimating.)
The Verdict
Asked to sum up the single biggest change since coming back, Sally doesn't hesitate: "How simple everything is — from not having to think twice about revenue recognition, through reporting, through being able to change estimates. It's all built to work for the agency, not against it."
True's story isn't about Pegasus being flashy. It's about what happens when the basics, revenue recognition, reporting, job visibility, just work, freeing up the one person holding the finance function together to spend her time on things that actually move the business forward.
Get True's full story in one page. Everything above, condensed into a one-pager you can share internally or keep on file. Download the PDF →
Ready to see what your finance function could do with the time back? Talk to us.