CaseStudy
Changing its tune
For more than a century, PRS for Music has ensured musicians receive fair royalties for their works. It is now undergoing a financial transformation to ensure it remains on song for years to come
Words: Annie Makoff Photography: Richard Gleed
Project casebook
Company data
Revenue in 2023
More than 500 staff
Results
Royalties paid out in 2023
More than 175,000 members
The challenge
To embed finance as a strategic business partner, while ensuring systems and processes are fully optimised.
Finance
Headcount: Approximately 500.
Key teams: 52 (40 within core finance and 12 within strategic finance).
Approach
PRS for Music operates a people-centric approach, putting songwriters, composers and music publishers and its team at its heart. The ongoing financial transformation drive involves collaboration with the finance team to assess challenges and pain points as well as system improvements such as automation and system optimisation.
Results
• Automated bank transaction information, creating estimated time saving of nine days a year.
• Transitioned month-end flash reporting from Excel to Power BI, generating significant time saving and improved user experience.
• Automating some aspects of the forecasting process, taking calculations out of Excel, saving time and improving controls and the audit trail.
Symbolically at least, 2024 was a significant year for British music copyright collective PRS for Music. It marked the 110th anniversary of its formation by a group of music publishers. The aim was to protect the interests of songwriters and composers by ensuring they are paid royalties for their music whenever it is used. These days, this includes broadcasting, streaming and downloading, as well as live performances.
But it has also been a significant few years for the organisation in other ways. PRS for Music, which represents more than 175,000 members, is currently undergoing a financial transformation initiative to optimise existing systems and processes, create efficiencies through system development and, crucially, to embed finance as a strategic business partner.
“Financial transformation is something you should be doing continuously – it’s not necessarily a one-off activity,” says Helen Stokes, head of strategic finance. “But over the past 18 months, we have definitely been on more of a drive to implement deep dives into our systems and processes.”
Slow evolution
Due to its long heritage, finance systems and processes within PRS for Music have had to evolve over time, compared with a typical start-up that might implement optimal technology systems right from the beginning. It has meant there has been a need to continue certain processes to maintain continuity while change occurs.
By the same token, PRS for Music is continuously ingesting large volumes of data from several different systems and vendors, including data from two joint venture organisations that license on the behalf of PRS for Music. Therefore, ensuring each system continues to ‘talk’ to each other and provide accurate information is essential, if not critical.
“There is quite a lot of granular detail that’s required to enable us to report correctly and pay out royalties to our members accurately and efficiently,” Stokes says. “We therefore need sufficient information available at source so that we can carry out all these processes. All the revenue we generate from licences needs to be invoiced and collected within finance and recorded accurately.”
All the revenue we generate from licences needs to be invoiced and collected within finance and recorded accurately.
Image: Richard Gleed
Workshopping ideas
The first phase of the latest financial transformation drive at PRS for Music took place 18 months ago in what Stokes describes as an “exploratory” approach. Part of this, says Stokes, was running workshops and discussion forums across the entire finance team to discuss pain points and opportunities for improvement, as well as thinking about longer-term system developments.
“Our members are always at the heart of all of our decision-making,” Stokes explains. “It’s therefore important to us that we also operate a people-centric approach internally too, so we’re bringing our teams along on the journey and making sure we have got buy-in. By doing this, we’re helping to cultivate that kind of people-centric mindset.”
Getting involvement from the finance team for these steering groups, rather than just managers, was important, says Stokes, because it brought “different perspectives and valuable insight”.
“The insight we needed had to come from the people who live and breathe the financial processes day-to-day, in terms of what is working and what isn’t,” she says. “They are the ones who know what the pain points and challenges are. Obviously, managers will have their views too, but we felt it was important to consult everybody.”
Powerful automation
Following these discussions, Stokes and the finance team were able to identify some strands of activity to take forward, such as streamlining bank transaction information and transitioning month-end flash reporting from Excel to Power BI.
Automating the bank transaction information has generated significant time savings. The previous manual operation took 30 minutes a day, five days a week. Now fully automated, the team believe it saves around nine days per year.
The move to Power BI for month-end flash reporting has also generated several improvements. It offers ‘drill-down’ functionality, which means users can dig into data and find out in-depth information for themselves without having to go back and forth to colleagues with questions.
“Power BI has created time savings because users can self-serve information,” says Stokes. “These small changes can take something out of your daily activity and add up to quite significant savings, especially when you start looking over a longer time period.”
The finance has is about to launch a project that will automate the reconciliation of ledger ingestion files in the source system. Currently, the process usually takes two hours a month but, under automation, it’s likely to be significantly less, as well as improving the accuracy and quality of information itself.
This ever-evolving landscape has a massive impact on music licensing and how we are collecting data.
Future-proofing finance
Another aspect of PRS for Music’s exploratory agenda was setting up a second group to look at emerging technologies and analyse how new developments may affect finance in the future.
“For example, the way people consume music is changing all the time,” Stokes says. “Going back many years, people were playing music on vinyl, then it was cassettes and CDs. Some people still have record players but music has become easily available digitally, with people subscribing to music streaming services. Obviously, this ever-evolving landscape has a massive impact on music licensing and how we are collecting data.”
At the same time, AI is playing an increasingly big part when it comes to financial processes. Its ability to digest huge amounts of information and data, and optimise processes that were previously manual, provides “ample opportunities” to improve efficiency in forecasting, in Stokes’ opinion.
Indeed, one of the key questions being asked by the team is: ‘Is there any technology we have at the moment we are underutilising?’ It is a key aspect of the financial transformation drive that considers whether to invest in a new system or ensure existing ones are being fully utilised.
Fully optimised
The next phase of PRS for Music’s financial transformation drive is what Stokes describes as a “deep dive”.
“This is about ensuring we are fully optimised and future-proofed for anything on the radar and any changes on the horizon,” she explains. “We want to ensure we have got accurate data at our fingertips, that we’re able to perform quality analysis and that we’re able to support decision-making within the business. It’s about ensuring people have the right information available at the right time.”
So what might this look like? Stokes suggests it will be about enhancing control processes, migrating data from Excel into automated systems and making processes much more efficient. “So less time turning the handle and crunching numbers, and more time for the value-add analysis,” she says.
The value-add piece is critical, given that PRS for Music puts its members and people at the heart of everything it does. Ultimately, it is about building trust and recognition across the business.
“We want to ensure finance is seen as a valued and trusted partner, and that we’re making key contributions to strategic business decisions,” Stokes says.
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Changing its tune
For more than a century, PRS for Music has ensured musicians receive fair royalties for their works. It is now undergoing a financial transformation to ensure it remains on song for years to come
Words: Annie Makoff Photography: Richard ReedRichard Gleed
