The spreadsheets were organized, but so was the chaos

Every quarter used to end the same way for Rozlynn Yong. Alone, at her laptop, well past midnight. 

Rozynn is the founder of Sparq Partners, an outsourced accounting and finance firm for the media and entertainment industry. Each quarter, she was responsible for turning months of transactions into the reforecasts her clients' tax accountants and leadership teams relied on to plan ahead. The work meant pulling data from three separate QuickBooks databases, one for each city her client operated in, and reconciling it all by hand. “Too many spreadsheets, too much chaos,” she says. “Organized chaos, though.” 

That chaos was manageable, until it wasn't. Today, Sparq runs that same close inside Intuit Enterprise Suite, with consolidated, multi-entity reporting that used to take Rozlynn until 1 AM to piece together by herself.

Sparq-ing an instinct

Rozlynn didn't set out to specialize in entertainment. She chose accounting as a sophomore in college, drawn in by what she assumed was a black-and-white discipline. “I learned that, like life, it's black, white, and a million shades of gray,” she says. 

She started in audit, discovered she loved analysis and forward-looking work, and eventually shaped Sparq around that instinct. Today the firm is a team of 12 serving ad agencies, creative studios, and production and post-production companies, ranging from startups to public companies. 

The firm's edge is operational fluency. Several of Rozlynn's staff have worked in-house at production companies, and she's woven curiosity about how clients actually run their business into Sparq's culture, from reception to the executive suite. “If we know operations better, that allows us to serve our clients better,” she says. In an industry where everything changes, sometimes in a split second, that adaptability isn't optional. It's the job.

Square pegs, round holes

Nowhere was that pressure clearer than with one of Sparq's primary clients, a post-production company with offices in Los Angeles, New York, and London. Each location ran its own QuickBooks database. Project management, payroll, HR, and bill pay each lived in a different platform, and some bank payments were still processed manually. “Why go to a thousand different platforms to execute the one thing?” Rozlynn asks. 

She describes the experience of stitching those systems together as building several 3D puzzles at once. “You're trying to make things work that weren't necessarily built for each other,” she says. As her client grew across three time zones, Sparq needed more than better spreadsheets. It needed one system that could see the whole business at once.

Everything in its right place 

Sparq moved its client from QuickBooks Online into Intuit Enterprise Suite, and the transition was far less disruptive than Rozlynn expected. “Onboarding with Intuit Enterprise Suite was essentially a flip of a switch,” she says. “The back end is literally the same. And then somewhere in there, you have multi-entity, and you have bill pay, and all of these other things that just make things more cohesive.” 

With her client's three locations now on one platform, Sparq consolidates reporting using parent-level shared dimensions and shared chart-of-accounts templates instead of exporting and merging three separate sets of books by hand. For Rozlynn, the real value of Intuit AI is that it takes on the repetitive prep work so her team can focus on judgment calls a system can't make. “You can have the AI do some of the prep work, and then keep the rest of it for... everything else that's nuanced,” she says.

For the complex, project-by-project accruals and deferrals that revenue recognition under ASC 606 requires, Sparq relies on Spreadsheet Sync to build balance sheet reconciliations and income statement summaries directly from live data. “It has already allowed us to pull all the data out on a consolidated basis and analyze it any which way we want,” Rozlynn says. 

For a firm whose clients measure success in how quickly they can move from one production to the next, that consolidation matters. “We have to move at the pace of production,” she says. “Intuit Enterprise Suite allows me to move at the speed of my clients.”

Better things to do at midnight 

The clearest change shows up in Rozlynn's calendar. The late-night reforecasting sessions that once defined quarter-end have largely disappeared. “Being able to deliver efficiently and effectively, without all of the 11 PM or midnight sessions, it is a sigh of relief,” Rozlynn says. She's also a mom, and the time back has meant more of it spent with her daughter. That time savings extends to how Rozlynn leads her team, too. Instead of walking her staff through how to enter an invoice or code a bank reconciliation, she can spend that time on mentorship. “Now I can talk to them about growth more,” she says, “teach them about the production industry, help them achieve their own personal goals, whether they're with Sparq or beyond.” 

Someone was listening 

Rozlynn also points to how directly Intuit has responded to her firm's feedback. After Sparq flagged an issue with how intercompany journal entry memos were posting across her client's entities, Intuit rolled out a fix within about two weeks. “Even one of the toughest critics on our team was like, ‘oh, that's pretty cool,’” she says. “It just fills my heart with joy to feel like we are heard, and that we matter.” It's part of why she has no plans to look elsewhere, even as Sparq and its clients keep scaling. “I don't want to move out of the Intuit ecosystem ever,” she says. As an early adopter of Intuit Enterprise Suite, Rozlynn sees her firm's feedback shaping a platform that other outsourced accounting firms in the creative industry will eventually rely on too, built by the people already doing the work at the pace their clients demand.