How to manage finance in a large iGaming team with multiple projects

09:18
How to manage finance in a large iGaming team with multiple projects

At the beginning, almost every team works the same way. Finances are managed in spreadsheets, while some information is kept in separate reports. One person, a many-armed octopus, remembers where everything is and still manages to keep it all under control.

But there comes a point when, as the team scales, this model stops working and the octopus can no longer keep up. More projects, more traffic sources, larger budgets and more people responsible for them. Manual control not only starts taking too much time, but also leads to losses.

The moment when media buying companies need change

100FTD faced exactly this problem. Data on expenses, campaign results, payouts and operating costs was stored in different spreadsheets that had to be constantly consolidated manually.

At some point, it became clear that the problem was no longer the spreadsheets themselves, but the approach. When answering a simple management question requires opening several files and checking numbers with different people, the system stops scaling.

“We have a large number of parallel processes: different projects, teams, traffic sources, budgets and models. In such conditions, even a small inaccuracy can affect the final result. Consolidating information from different sources and checking discrepancies took the most time. We could see the performance of an individual campaign, but for a management decision it is important to understand the system as a whole: actual expenses, additional operating costs, cash movement, the result of a specific direction and its impact on the overall arbitrage P&L,” says Yaroslav, COO at 100FTD.

The iGaming market has long stopped forgiving inefficiency. If the old principle was “there is a budget — launch traffic,” today profitability depends on the quality of financial management.

“That was when we decided to move from manual accounting to a unified financial control system. Together with the CostView team, we automated a significant part of the processes and brought financial data into one environment,” Yaroslav shares.

One management system in the iGaming sector instead of dozens of spreadsheets

“The 100FTD team came to us with a very specific request — to see how the service works in real operations and adapt it to their processes. They were concerned about three things: discrepancies between reports, time lost on manual reporting and the inability to quickly calculate profit for each offer and buyer. We refined the first modules during onboarding specifically around these pain points,” says CostView founder Dmytro.

CostView dashboard for managing payment services, cards and balances in the iGaming sector

After implementing the unified system, the team was able to see not isolated numbers but the complete financial picture.

The key metrics for daily management became:

  • ROI by offers and directions
  • actual PnL
  • team cash flow
  • expenses and profitability by individual projects
  • operating expenses that had previously remained “invisible”

Automation reduced the amount of manual work, lowered the number of errors and made it possible to make faster decisions based on up-to-date data.

In addition, the system helped the team better protect confidential data.

CostView shows revenue, expenses, profit and ROI for traffic arbitrage in one system

“We proceed from the fact that a team’s financial data is sensitive information and access to it cannot simply be based on trust. That is why we offer two formats: Cloud, where the data is stored on our infrastructure with proper protection, and Self-Hosted, where the data never physically leaves the client’s infrastructure. If a promise is trust by words, self-hosted is a technical guarantee: the question of whether anyone has access to the data is resolved at the architectural level rather than by company policy,” Dmytro adds.

Result

Today, financial management at 100FTD has become much more systematic. The team gets the information it needs faster, controls expenses better and spends less time preparing reports. Most importantly, decisions are made based on the complete picture rather than separate spreadsheets.

The full story of the cooperation between 100FTD and CostView, as well as the implementation details, can be found in the interview on TrafficUltras.